
Class j_ 

Book ^_ 

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COn-HIGirr DEPOSIT. 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 



University of Virginia 
Barbour-Page Foundation 

THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 
OF ROBERT BROWNING 



FOUR LECTURES 

BY 

THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY,L.H.D,LL.D. 

PROFESSOR EMERITI'S OF ENGLISH IN YALE UNIVERSITY 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1911 



.L4 



COPYIICHT, 191 1, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SON'S 
Published October, 19 11 



ff 







THE BARBOUR-PAGE LECTURE 
FOUNDATION 

The University of Virginia is indebted for 
the establishment of the Barbour-Page Foun- 
dation to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. 
Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington, D. C. 
In 1907, Mrs. Page donated to the University 
the sum of ^^22,000, the annual income of 
which is to be used in securing each session 
the delivery before the University of a series 
of not less than three lectures by some dis- 
tinguished man of letters or of science. The 
conditions of the Foundation require that the 
Barbour-Page lectures for each session be not 
less than three in number; that they be de- 
livered by a specialist in some branch of liter- 
ature, science, or art; that the lecturer present 



in the series of lectures some fresh aspect or 
aspects of the department of thought in which 
he is a specialist; and that the entire series de- 
livered each session, taken together, shall pos- 
sess such unity that they may be published by 
the Foundation in book form. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. " Pauline " and " Paracelsus " . . i 

II. " Strafford " and " Sordello " . . 45 

III. " Bells and Pomegranates "... 95 

IV. " Bells and Pomegranates "... 147 

Index 201 



"PAULINE" AND "PARACELSUS" 

I purpose in the present course of lectures to 
give an account of the hterary career of Robert 
Browning from the pubhcation of his first poem 
in 1833 to his marriage and departure for Italy 
in 1846. The story of the works he produced 
during this period demands, of course, recital; 
but the principal aim which I have had in view 
is to bring out distinctly how he struck his con- 
temporaries; to make clear the causes that trans- 
formed the cordial welcome he received during 
the fourth decade of the last century into the in- 
difference and neglect which waited upon him 
during the decades immediately following; and, 
finally, to make manifest the nature of the agen- 
cies which brought about the remarkable and 
peculiar revival of his reputation during the clos- 
ing years of his life. Accordingly, it is his lit- 
erary career that comes almost exclusively under 
consideration. Only so far as it bears upon the 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



comprehension of that are any records given of 
his personal life. Most even of this little will be 
found comprised in the opening lecture. 

Criticism of the work he produced during this 
period is necessarily involved in any discussion 
of his career. But there has been no intention 
to go into it largely, far less exhaustively. About 
the value or correctness of what of it is here given 
there will assuredly be difference of opinion. 
The inferences drawn, the views expressed, are 
likely to encounter the dissent of many of you, 
perhaps even of most of you. At all events, I 
have not needed to come to this university to 
find those who deem them w-rong and some who 
call them abominable. The justice of critical 
conclusions must be left to time to determine, 
when the likes and dislikes of the present, its 
fancies and its fashions, have passed out of rec- 
ognition and almost out of remembrance. 

But though the future can test most satis- 
factorily the truth of opinion, it is usually at a 
disadvantage in testing the truth of fact. It is 
for tlie present to detect and expose falsity of 
statement, before frequency of repetition has 
hardened the general mind into settled beliefs 
which, through laziness or indifference, men re- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



fuse ever after to discard or even modify. While, 
therefore, I ask no one to accept the judgments 
here expressed, I think I may venture to insist 
that the facts I shall give in controverted matters 
cannot be successfully disputed. This is a point 
of some importance, because about certain events 
in the poet's career there has already begun to 
gather a mass of mythical statement, v^^hich is 
found duly recorded in the accounts furnished of 
his life. It is all the more important to correct 
it now, because certain of these erroneous as- 
sertions have for their support the authority of 
Browning himself. Some explanation of this 
sort it seemed desirable to premise before enter- 
ing, as I now do, upon the main subject itself. 

Robert Browning first appeared as an author 
in the early part of 1833. He was born on May 
7, 18 12, in Southampton Street, Camberwell, a 
borough on the southern side of the Thames. 
Accordingly, at the time of his first venture into 
literature he had not yet attained his majority. 
As a general rule, to which there are not many 
exceptions, poetical genius develops early. Not 
infrequently, too, it exhausts itself early. Few 
are the great poets who have reached a rea- 



4 THE EARLY LITER^iRY CAREER 

sonably advanced age whose best work has not 
been composed mainly in the first half of their 
lives. Their later production shows no advance 
upon the earlier: more often it indicates distinct 
retrogression. This is not altogether true of 
either Browning or Tennyson; but even of them 
it is in great measure true. 

The boy grew up in a home populous with 
books; for his father, a clerk in the Bank of 
England, was in his way a good deal of a scholar. 
The son, with literary tastes keenly marked, be- 
gan early to produce poems. These, fortunately 
perhaps for the peace of our generation, have 
disappeared. They were largely written under 
the influence of Byron, who, for the whole period 
of his literary activity, was what he described 
himself as being for a while, "the grand Napo- 
leon of the realms of rhyme." To him all poet- 
ical aspirants then yielded homage in the form 
of imitation, conscious or unconscious. 

The father's tastes in literature were in sym- 
pathy mainly with the old poetic school of the 
eighteenth century which was dying out, or had 
already died out, if properly any school can ever 
be said to die out which has had any real reason 
for existing at all. Naturally much of the pro- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



duction of the time which was slowly emerging 
into public notice, would not be found upon the 
shelves of his library. In consequence, it was a 
good deal of a revelation to the boy when he came 
to know that such a poet as Shelley had even ex- 
isted. With considerable difficulty he succeeded 
in procuring most of the dead author's then little 
read books. The influence of this writer af- 
fected him profoundly, and, as it seems to me, 
not altogether happily. It operated to strength- 
en tendencies and to exaggerate characteristics 
which, in his case, stood in need of repression and 
lessening. In particular, the vagueness which 
pervades much of Shelley's poetry had assuredly 
no efl^ect in correcting that disposition toward 
obscurity, not necessarily in his ideas, but in the 
expression of his ideas, which remained to the 
last Browning's besetting literary sin. 

It was in the autumn of 1832 while fully under 
the influence of this author that he composed his 
first printed work. His father, proud as he was 
of his son's talents, had no disposition to sink 
money in the publication of the poem. It is not 
impossible, brought up as he had been in the old 
school of versification, that he failed to under- 
stand it. Nor, in fact, was it then a favorable 



6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

time for bringing out poetr}' of any sort what- 
ever. The great Georgian intellectual outburst 
had spent itself. It had been followed by one of 
those regularly recurring periods in the history 
of literature when the human mind seems for a 
while to need to lie fallow as a result of previous 
overproduction. At any rate, the literary palate 
had lost its relish for the food which it had once 
eagerly craved, and had not yet found another 
kind to suit its altered taste. The public had 
become surfeited with verse. They not merely 
refused to read it, they refused to buy it. There 
was this justification for their attitude that most 
of what then came out was not worth either read- 
ing or buying. It was frequently assumed and 
asserted by the professional critics that the day 
for poetry was past. Accordingly, without the 
prerequisite of paying for its production, no 
publisher would think of allowing his name to 
go upon the title-page of almost any book of 
verse, least of all upon that of an untried author 
who was as yet little more than a boy. An aunt 
of Browning's, however, came forward at this 
juncture and undertook to bear the expense. 
Accordingly, early in 1833 a little volume of 
about seventy pages made its appearance, bear- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



ing the imprint of Saunders, Otley & Co., a 
firm in Conduit Street. It was entitled, "Paul- 
ine, or the Fragment of a Confession." 

The poem contained over a thousand lines of 
blank verse, fully as mystical as any and a 
good deal more mystical than much that Brown- 
ing subsequently wrote. It was anonymous 
and the secret of its authorship was long main- 
tained. A copy of this original edition is now 
one of the rarest of volumes. In 1890 it was 
said that only five were known to exist; and it is 
still safe to assert that the pretty thorough search 
which has gone on since that time has not suc- 
ceeded in tripling the number. Accordingly, 
when one does appear in the market it com- 
mands a price absurdly disproportionate to its 
actual value. In January, 1896, a copy contain- 
ing on the fly-leaf some observations upon the 
poem by the poet himself was sold by auction 
and brought the comfortable sum of one hun- 
dred and forty-five pounds. It is mainly those 
who never read poetry that can afford to pay 
such prices for it. 

Browning, who at this period combined with 
the dove-like guilelessness of youth something 
of the craft of the serpent, paved the way him- 



rHE EARLY UTFJiARY CAREER 



self for one fairly favorable notice of the coming 
book. William Johnson Fox, preacher, orator, 
and essayist, was then a potent power in a not in- 
considerable section of the literary world. He 
was at that time the editor of The Monthly Re- 
positoryy a Unitarian periodical, which he was 
tr}ing to divest of its theological character and 
replace by one more distinctly literary and politi- 
cal. To him Browning, while still a boy, had 
been introduced by a female friend named Eliza 
Flower. She was the elder of rsvo sisters, one of 
whom, more easily recognized by her married 
name of Sarah Flower Adams, is well known to 
the religious world by her hymn beginning 
"Nearer, My God, to Thee." Eliza Flower 
was a musician, and attained no mean reputa- 
tion as a composer of music. With this refined 
and highly gifted woman, nine years his senior, 
the youthful Browning did the wisest and most 
creditable thing he could do as a boy by falling 
in love. She died at a comparatively early age; 
but to the last day of his life the poet cherished 
her memory with peculiar tenderness. To Fox, 
Eliza Flower had shown a collection of short 
poems written by her boy-admirer when he was 
about twelve. To it he had given the name of 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



Incondita — a title which he might appropriately 
have applied to a good deal of his later work. 
The critic did not recommend these pieces for 
publication, but he recognized in their writer the 
possession of unquestionable poetic power. The 
manuscript containing them was entirely de- 
stroyed. Much to the grief of his partisans, the 
copy made by Miss Flower shared the same fate 
at the hands of the poet, when later in life it came 
into his possession. 

Browning, now about to make his first venture 
in print, bethought him of the kindly critic of 
his unpublished early verse. Accordingly he 
sent him a letter signed with his initials announc- 
ing the coming appearance of his poem. It is 
printed in full by one of his biographers, and 
though it has been long before the public no one 
of his admirers seems to be conscious of the fact 
that never was there a more transparent attempt 
to secure, under the guise of humility, a favor- 
able review. "Perhaps," wrote he, "by the aid 
of the subjoined initials and a little reflection 
you may recollect an oddish sort of boy who had 
the honor of being introduced to you at Hackney 
some years back — at that time a sayer of verse 
and a doer of it, and whose doing you had a little 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



previously commended after a fashion — (whether 
in earnest or not, God knows): that individual it 
is who takes the liberty of addressing one whose 
slight commendation then was more thought of 
than all the gun, drum, and trumpet of praise 
would be now, and to submit to you a free and 
easy sort of thing which he wrote some months 
ago *on one leg' and which comes out this week 
— having either heard or dreamed that you con- 
tribute to The Westminster. Should it be found 
too insignificant for cutting up, I shall no less 
remain, dear sir. Your most obedient servant, 
R. B." 

This must be considered, if we take the youth 
of the writer into account, a most skilful device 
for securing a review of one's work which even 
if not favorable would not be hostile. A delight- 
ful boyishness pervades the whole letter. There 
is the affected depreciation of the poem itself as 
a free and easy thing written hastily. Better 
still is that appreciation of the commendation 
bestowed by the critic upon the verses produced 
at that earlier period of life when such praise was 
worth more to him than thunders of applause 
would be at the time of writing, now that he had 
readied, it may be added, his present advanced 



OF ROBERT BROWNING n 

age of nearly twenty-one. Nor is there any lack 
of skOl displayed in the suggestion that the book 
would furnish materials for cutting up in The 
fVcstmtnster Review. 

The appeal to Fox was successful. It was not, 
however, in The IVestminster that his notice of 
the poem appeared, but in The Monthly Reposi- 
tory for April. There he welcomed the work 
with a warm and unquestionably sincere eulo- 
gium. In it he gave distinct expression to his 
belief that a writer had come who was entitled to 
be called a poet. He had previously reviewed the 
volume of 1833 of the then little-known Tennyson 
with a good deal of enthusiasm. One sentence 
of this article on " Pauline " is indeed remarkable 
for its early reference to the two great poets of 
the Victorian era. "We felt certain of Tenny- 
son," he wrote, "before we saw the book by a 
few verses which had struggled into a newspaper; 
we are not the less certain of the author of 
'Pauline.'" All of us are wise after the event. 
Rarely has it been given to one man to foresee 
and predict the future glory of two great writers 
of widely diverse gifts, who were then either 
not known at all or known only to limited circles 
made up largely of personal friends. 



THE EARLY LITER.ARY CAREER 



The social and literary influence of Fox was 
then great. It unquestionablv had the effect of 
procuring for the young and unknown author a 
favorable hearing in quarters which otherwise 
would in all probability have paid little heed to 
his production. Here it is desirable to give a 
brief account of a certain class of critical period- 
icals, which, well known as they soon came to be, 
were then just beginning to influence or direct 
public opinion; for it was about this period that 
the weekly had begun to displace the quarterly 
and the monthly from the supreme position which 
these had long held as arbiters of literary merit. 
These weeklies were then, as now, of t^vo classes: 
the purely literary and the combined literary and 
political. Five of them occupied at that time 
a specially prominent position. The oldest of 
them belonged to the second class. It was The 
Examiner, which had been established in 1 808 
by John and Leigh Hunt, and was now under 
the control of the noted journalist, Albany Fon- 
blanque. With him came to be associated in this 
fourth decade of the century John Forster as lit- 
erary and dramatic critic. Its main rivals were 
The Spectator and The Atlas. The oldest of the 
other class was The Literary Gazette^ which had 



OF ROBERT RBOWNING 13 

been founded in 18 16. At that time it still re- 
tained its lead in the general popular estimate; 
but its influence was steadily lessening before that 
of its rival, TJie Athenceum, which had been 
established in 1828. 

From some of these critical periodicals the 
poem received favorable mention. This was 
noticeably true of The Atlas and The Athencvum. 
The article in the former concluded, indeed, with 
the declaration that the work had created in the 
reviewer's mind just so much interest that he 
would be induced to look with curiosity to the 
author's next essay. The Athenccum was, if 
anything, even more cordial. It quoted pas- 
sages from the poem. Still it is evident that the 
critic saw that for the work as a whole there 
would be little recognition. In truth, his clos- 
ing words gave one further example of the uni- 
versal despondency which had at that time over- 
taken the English race as to the future of the 
highest form of literature. "The day is past," 
he said mournfully, "for either fee or fame in the 
service of the muse; but to one who sings so 
naturally, poetry must be as easy as music to 
the bird, and no doubt it has a solace all its 
own." 



14 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

But it must not be supposed that the three 
periodicals whose opinions have been quoted 
represent the universal attitude. "Somewhat 
mystical," ran the criticism in The Literary 
Gazette, "somewhat poetical, somewhat sensual, 
and not a little unintelligible — this is a dreamy 
volume without an object and unfit for publica- 
tion." Even more concisely was the poem de- 
scribed in Taifs Edinburgh Magazine, the organ 
of the Northern Whigs. It is there simply men- 
tioned as "a piece of pure bewilderment." It 
was this brief and contemptuous notice that fore- 
stalled and prevented the publication in the 
magazine of the review of the poem which John 
Stuart Mill had prepared for this periodical. 
But the remark that Mill made on the margin of 
the book came a few years after to Browning's 
knowledge , and filled him with just pleasure. 
"Is there not somewhere," he wrote to Miss 
Barrett, in February, 1845, "the ^^"^^ book I first 
printed when a boy, with John Mill, the meta- 
physical head, his marginal note that 'the writer 
possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever 
knew in a sane human being.' " ^ 

^"Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 28. 



OF ROBERT RROWNING 15 

The point of view, however, is everything. 
Sanity was the one thing found lacking by the 
reviewer in Eraser's Magazine, the London organ 
of the Tories. That periodical was then bring- 
ing out a series of critical articles entitled, " Poets 
of the Day." These articles were somewhat 
contemptuously headed Batch the First, Batch 
the Second, and so on, as the numbers succes- 
sively appeared. In spite of the not altogether 
respectful heading, it is right to remark that the 
notices were occasionally of a laudatory char- 
acter. In the number for December, 1833, 
"Pauline" received attention. The review opens 
with a citation of the Latin quotation which 
Browning had placed at the beginning of his 
book. '' Non duhito quin titulus, etc.," it said, 
"quotes the author of 'Pauline' from Cornelius 
Agrippa; which we, shearing the sentence of 
its lengthy continuation, translate thus: we are 
under no kind of doubt about the title to be given 
to you, my poet, you being, beyond all question, 
as mad as Cassandra, without any of the power 
to prophesy like her or to construct a connected 
sentence like anybody else." The article went 
on to designate him as the Mad Poet of the Batch; 
as being mad not in one direction only but in all. 



1 6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

But no review, whether friendly or hostile, 
could have then or did have the slightest in- 
fluence upon the sale of "Pauhne." None at 
any rate could have saved the work from obliv- 
ion, if left to itself. The poet, toward the close 
of his life, when Browning societies were in the 
heyday of their vigor and were scattering his 
name far and wide, came seemingly to be rather 
proud of the ill success which according to him 
had attended his two earliest ventures into 
poetry. He exaggerated, perhaps unconsciously, 
the disfavor with which they had been received. 
Of this work in particular he represented it as 
being the completest of failures from the point of 
view of sale. "I willingly repeat," said he in a 
letter of 1886, "that to the best of my belief no 
single copy of the original edition of * Pauline' 
found a buyer; the book was undoubtedly still- 
born — and that despite the kindly offices of many 
friends who did their best to bring about a suc- 
cessful birth." ^ Certainly the fact of his ever 
having written such a poem soon passed away 
almost entirely from the memory of men. One 
reason for this was doubtless that he himself 

' "Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents," 
edited by T. J. Wise, London, privately printed, 1896, vol. II, p. 58. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 17 

came to have an unfavorable opinion of it. He 
therefore largely kept to himself the secret of its 
existence and authorship. 

In the course of his intimacy, however, with 
the woman he was soon to call his wife he had 
come to disclose the facts. In January, 1846, 
Miss Barrett wrote to him that she was anxious 
to have the poem, in fact determined to have it 
in a day or two. "Must you see 'Pauline'?" 
he asked almost plaintively. If so, he begged 
her to wait a few days till he could correct the 
misprints in it and write its history. It was so 
evident, indeed, that he was reluctant to have her 
see it at all that a little later she is found priding 
herself upon her virtue in not sending for it to 
the booksellers, before she knew positively 
whether he would much dislike to have her read 
it. Browning continued to protest. The poem, 
he said, was altogether foolish, and it was not 
boy-like, and he had rather she saw real infantine 
efforts — verses at six years old, drawings still 
earlier — anything but this ambiguous, feverish 
production. But the thought of her buying it 
at a bookseller's amused him. " I smile in glori- 
ous security," he wrote, — "having a whole bale 
of sheets at the house-top. He never knew my 



i8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

name even and I withdrew them after a little 
while." ^ The outcome of it all was that Miss 
Barrett had to content herself with a promise that 
she should see the work some day. 

"Pauline" in fact was so thoroughly forgotten 
that for two decades it was hardly mentioned by 
any one in connection with Browning's name. 
Some twenty years after its publication Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, then a young poet and painter, 
came across a copy of it in the library of the Brit- 
ish Museum. He was profoundly struck by it. 
Furthermore, so confident was he that no one but 
the author of "Paracelsus" could have been its 
author that he wrote to ask Browning, who was 
then in Florence, if this were not the case. In 
his letter he stated that as the poem was not 
otherwise procurable he had copied the whole of 
it with his own hand. Browning returned an 
affirmative answer. This seems to have been 
the first discovery of the book and the poet's first 
acknowledgment of its authorship to any outside 
of his immediate circle. It was not included 
among his collected works until the edition of 
1868. In a brief preface to it then he declared 

' "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, pp. 386, 390, 400. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 19 

that he retained it with extreme repugnance. 
It was nothing, he said, but a matter of necessity 
that led him to reprint it. He knew that copies 
of it were in existence; that sooner or later it 
was the intention to have it republished. So 
he sought to forestall any action of the sort by 
correcting some misprints — not a single syllable 
had been changed, he asserted — and by intro- 
ducing it with an exculpatory word. "The 
thing," he wrote, "was my earliest attempt at 
'poetry, always dramatic in principle, and so 
many utterances of so many imaginary persons, 
not mine,' which I have since written according 
to a scheme less extravagant and scale less im- 
practicable than were ventured upon in this crude 
preliminary sketch." This accords with the in- 
scription written as early as 1838 in the volume 
which has been already noted as commanding 
the price of over seven hundred dollars. 

Before taking into consideration his next work, 
it is desirable to give a brief outline of Browning's 
personal history up to the time of his first anony- 
mous publication. His education, outside of the 
private instruction he received and of the attend- 
ance upon certain schools in the vicinity, was 
limited to a short course of study at University 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



College, in Gower Street. His name appears on 
the registrar's books for the opening session of 
1829-30. But he did not remain long. Italy, 
he was wont to say, was his university. It was 
certainly one of the best schools in which to pur- 
sue later study. It is more than doubtful if it 
was an advantageous one for a beginner possessed 
of his mental characteristics. There are many 
other kinds of education besides that furnished 
by the university, and some for some persons far 
better. For Browning I doubt if any would 
have been as good, and his failure to receive it 
will, it is to be feared, have in the long run a 
damaging effect upon his reputation. His writ- 
ings show throughout the lack of that final re- 
sult of thorough training, the ability of the com- 
municator of ideas to put himself in the position 
of the recipient. 

This was clearly a defect that belonged to 
Browning by nature. In consequence it never 
could have been fully supplied. Still some of its 
worst results could and would have been largely 
corrected by severe intellectual drill. That 
would never have added to his greatness as a 
poet in those bursts of inspiration in which the 
poet is at his highest. It would never have given 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 21 

Strength to his pinions for a loftier flight. But 
no writer, however eminent, Hves constantly, or 
even for any length of time^ in a state of exalta- 
tion. Upon those lower levels on which the 
mind habitually moves, the rigid intellectual 
training of the university would have given 
clearness to expression, it would in particular 
have prevented resort to the startling abruptness 
of transition which causes the existence of those 
perplexing puzzles, those complicated knots of 
meaning which it is now the delight of the dis- 
ciple to unravel or to fancy that he has un- 
ravelled. 

In the long run these intricacies and ambigui- 
ties of expression are certain to affect Browning's 
reputation injuriously. Indeed, there need be 
no hesitation in saying that from the very outset 
they have so affected it. But they will affect it 
far more in the future. When contemporary in- 
terest has disappeared, it is the artistic perfection 
of a work that will recommend it to the great 
body of readers. What is bizarre, what is gro- 
tesque, what is unnecessarily obscure will then 
find few apologists and fewer admirers. In our 
literature there is a marked illustration of this 
truth in the case of Donne. He was in his time, 



22 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

as Ben Jonson expressed it, the great lord of 
wit. So far as intellectual power is concerned, 
he could hardly reckon a superior among his 
contemporaries. He still retains a band of de- 
voted admirers, and to me as one of the number 
he seems well worthy of the admiration they be- 
stow. But he will always be caviare to the 
general. The crabbed diction, the rugged 
rhymes, the inharmonious versification, the ob- 
scure phraseology, all these frequently recurring 
as they do would continue to repel the multitude 
from attempting to crack the kernel of a nut even 
were it to contain meat more delicious than that 
which Donne's own writings afford. 

Two years after came Browning's first ap- 
pearance in literature under his own name. 
This was then and for a long time following 
usually regarded as his first actual appearance. 
It was in the summer of 1835 that his poem 
came out entitled "Paracelsus." The composi- 
tion of it had taken up a large share of the pre- 
ceding winter. To the subject he was led by his 
fondness for out-of-the-way learning and by his 
interest in mediaevalism and mysticism which 
was, or had become a part of his nature. The 
life of the hero of the piece, who has been vari- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 23 

ously viewed as an adventurous quack and as a 
great pioneer in medical discovery, had been 
suggested to him by a foreign friend, Comte de 
Rupert-Montclar, to whom the finished work 
was dedicated. But on reflection the suggest- 
tion had been withdrawn by its maker. There 
was no opportunity to introduce the subject of 
love, and upon love, the Frenchman sagely re- 
marked, every young man has, of course, some- 
thing new to say. Browning apparently had 
nothing new to say. But he was not deterred 
from the project by this fact. He decided to 
take the life of Paracelsus as his subject and to 
treat it in his own way. 

The poem was finished in March, 1835. The 
difl&culty was then to find a publisher. To 
Moxon all aspiring unknown poets applied, be- 
cause he had written poetry himself. Accord- 
ingly, to Moxon Browning went first. That 
publisher declined even inspecting the manu- 
script. There was no money in verse, he de- 
clared, and he felt that he had done his share in 
bringing out unprofitable ventures of that sort. 
After trying one or two other firms to no effect, the 
poem was finally taken by Effingham Wilson, the 
same man who brought out Tennyson's volume 



24 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

of 1830. It was clearly not sought for eagerly 
by him, for it was Browning's father who paid 
the expense of the publication. It can be 
added that his father never got his money back 
from the proceeds of the sale. This, though not 
in the least surprising to the students of the liter- 
ary history of the period, seems to surprise some 
of the poet's biographers profoundly. 
1^ Butthough "Paracelsus"wasnota work which 
paid the expense of publication, its appearance 
announced, to all who had eyes to see, the coming 
of a great original poet. The form into which it 
was cast partook of the dramatic. It was divided 
into acts corresponding to five successive epochs 
in the life of its hero. Conversation or rather 
discourse goes on between the few personages 
that appear. But in no proper sense of that 
word is the poem a drama, nor did Browning so 
intend it. He took care, indeed, to guard against 
any such misinterpretation of it, though some of 
his later disciples have either been ignorant of 
his caution or have chosen to ignore it. In the 
preface to the original edition he gave full recog- 
nition to the fact that the work did not conform 
to the canons of stage representation and that it 
had not been prepared with that object in view. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 25 

"I have endeavored," he said, ''to v^rite a poem 
and not a drama." It is as a poem alone there- 
fore that it is entitled to be judged. 

Whether the picture given of the character of 
Paracelsus be true or no does not strictly 
enter into the discussion of the literary merits of 
the work. Certain it is, hov^ever, that the por- 
trayal has profoundly affected the opinion enter- 
tained in these latter days of the man portrayed; 
and if there has been a revolution of sentiment 
in his favor, to this one poem probably more than 
to any other single cause may be attributed the 
change, at least in the English-speaking world. 
It is noticeable that Browning subsequently fell 
into the error, pardonable, perhaps, at the time, 
of deriving our English word "bombast" from 
the name of the hero of the piece. This in full 
was Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombas- 
tus von Hohenheim. "'Bombast,' his proper 
name," he wrote, "probably acquired from the 
characteristic phraseology of his lectures that 
unlucky significance which it has since retained." 
The student of English etymology, much hard- 
ened to derivations of this sort, scarcely needs to 
be told that "bombast," like the corresponding 
"fustian," is a word derived from late Latin 



2 6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

through the Old French and designates strictly 
a kind of coarse cotton cloth which from its use 
in stuffing and padding clothes came to adopt 
the transferred sense of swollen or inflated lan- 
guage. 

"Paracelsus" was really the first, as it has re- 
mained, one of the finest of a long series of stud- 
ies in character and sensation in which Browning 
was to exhibit peculiar excellence. There is not 
here the time nor is this the place to give a full 
account of the poem. A most marked attribute 
of it is the high intellectual character accorded to 
the hero, the original loftiness of his aims, his 
aspirations for a success too great for mortal to 
achieve, with his disdain of the helps by which 
mortals attain to whatever success they achieve, 
the inevitable reaction and degradation that fol- 
low failure, and the final purification that comes 
from trial and sorrow and suffering. Paracel- 
sus learns after long experience the lesson that 
the pursuit of knowledge pure and simple, while 
setting little store on the element of human sym- 
pathy and love, furnishes a barren harvest even 
from the point of view of knowledge itself. To 
him, as to inferior men, as he looks back upon a 
career of effort which has been wasted and at- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 27 

tempts which have miscarried, comes that de- 
spondency which haunts the heart of even those 
seemingly the most fortunate. It is life's ever- 
recurring tragedy of faith that has failed, of ex- 
pectation that has been disappointed, and of as- 
piration that has died, which finds expression in 
the inquiry which sooner or later every thought- 
ful man puts to himself as he compares what is 
with what was desired or hoped to be — Is this 
all ? Is this what I have longed for, struggled 
for, dreamed of as worthy of being accomplished ? 
Such is the inquiry which Paracelsus directs 
to his own heart. In the moment of highest ap- 
parent success he does not hide his deep discon- 
tent with life. He had failed. He was miser- 
able. Yet to the outside world he had at the very 
time reached the summit of human achievement. 
His name was in every one's mouth. His lect- 
ures were thronged by listening crowds who 
hung upon his words, treasured his sayings, wor- 
shipped his person. Even the chosen friend of 
his youth who had sought to dissuade him from 
the career he had marked out for himself, who 
had forewarned him of failure, is imposed upon 
by this universal acclaim which hails him as the 
miracle of men, the deliverer of the race from 



2 8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

the bondage of antiquated dogma and belief. 
Not so Paracelsus himself. He recognizes the 
unsubstantiality of the basis upon which his rep- 
utation rests. Not in the least blinded by the 
glitter of present approval, he perceives plainly 
that the hour of his degradation is on its way, 
and he confesses the moral failure which fore- 
shadows the coming of the personal one. The 
general declension in the aims of Paracelsus, the 
substitution of inferior motives for the lofty ones 
by which he had originally been actuated, is typi- 
fied in the beautiful lyric in the fourth act begin- 
ning with the line, 

" Over the seas our galley went " 

So much for the character of the work; it re- 
mains to consider its reception by the public. 
The present age which has been fertile in myth- 
ical stories about Browning's early career, has 
more than once loudly proclaimed that " Paracel- 
sus" was received by the public unfavorably: 
perhaps with even less favor than was "Paul- 
ine"; that in truth it was a failure. If by failure 
is meant that it had no large sale, the assertion 
may be conceded to be perfectly true. But in 
such a fact there was at that time nothing excep- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 29 

tional. During the decade in which it made its 
appearance no poem or volume of poems pos- 
sessed of distinct literary quality had a large sale. 
This was true even of the "Philip Van Artevelde" 
of Henry Taylor, which came out in May, 1834. 
That work, the most successful of all the works 
of high grade produced during the period in 
question, hardly more than paid the expense of 
its production, if, indeed, it can be said to have 
done as much as that. If at any time during 
the nineteenth century the profession of poet 
deserved Milton's characterization of it as "the 
homely slighted shepherd's trade," it was during 
its fourth decade. 

But in every other respect, save that of sale, 
"Paracelsus" was the most unqualified of suc- 
cesses. It gave its author at once a recognized 
position in the world of letters. It brought him 
the acquaintance and regard of many men of 
conspicuous eminence in various fields of intel- 
lectual activity. With some it gave, birth to in- 
timate friendship. The authorship of "Paul- 
ine" was known to but few. Accordingly by 
most readers this second poem was believed to be 
his earliest work. More and more, as time went 
on, this continued to be the impression. By all 



3° 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



men possessed of keen critical discernment 
''Paracelsus," as the first production of a man 
who had not yet reached his twenty-third birth- 
day, was looked upon as giving promise of a brill- 
iant future. Defects it admittedly had; but in 
their eyes these were far more than counterbal- 
anced by its merits. The feeling about the 
greatness of the work grew as time went on and 
men had had sufficient leisure to become fully 
acquainted with it. No one who makes himself 
familiar with much of the contemporary com- 
ment about the man and the book can hardly 
help discovering the steadily growing recognition 
of Browning's genius and the glowing anticipa- 
tions that were then entertained of the loftiness 
of the achievements he was to accomplish. For 
example, two anonymous sonnets addressed "to 
,the author of 'Paracelsus,'" which appeared in 
«x^ the New Monthly Magazine for September, 
1836, give full expression to the belief in his 
future greatness which even at that early period 
many had come to cherish. 

It is all the more desirable to bring out dis- 
tinctly the contemporary success of "Paracel- 
sus," in the highest sense of the word success, 
because Browning himself was in a measure re- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 31 

sponsible for the contrary belief. In his later 
years one gets the impression that he was almost 
as eager to underrate the good fortune of his 
first poems as he was to contradict the reports 
of the ill fortune of his plays, A disposition 
of this sort showed itself at a somewhat early 
period. Late in 1845 he wrote to the woman he 
was soon to wed that as compared with the brill- 
iant success of Talfourd's "Ion," his "Paracel- 
sus" had been a dead failure. There was no 
real justification for a comparison of this sort. 
The circumstances attending the publication of 
the two poems were essentially different. Tal- 
fourd's name had been long before the public. 
He had appeared as an author before Browning 
was born. He had been a frequent contributor 
to periodical literature, he had made for himself 
a reputation at the bar. His tragedy of "Ion," 
previously printed for private circulation, had 
been produced in May, 1836. Largely through 
the acting of Macready it had gained a success 
on the stage, which had aroused a corresponding 
curiosity among readers. The feeling was nat- 
urally reflected in the sale of the work in a pub- 
lished form. In this same letter Browning went 
on to say that until Forster's notice in The Ex- 



32 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

aminer every journalist that thought it worth 
while to allude to his poem treated it with entire 
contempt, beginning with The Athenceum. Out 
of a long string of notices which his publisher re- 
ceived, each one vied with its predecessor in ex- 
pressing disgust at his ''rubbish," until some- 
thing of a change was effected by the article in 
The Examiner just mentioned. 

The ignorance, however great, of one man can 
not well be deemed sufficient to counterbalance 
the knowledge, however slight, of another man. 
It would therefore be presumptuous in me to call 
in question the accuracy of these assertions of 
Browning, because diligent search has not en- 
abled me to find anywhere anything to justify 
them. Unquestionably the earliest notices of 
his poem in the leading critical authorities were 
wholly inadequate. The limited time they 
took for examination could not at best have kept 
them from being otherwise than unsatisfactory. 
''Paracelsus" was formally published on Satur- 
day, the fifteenth of August. On that very day 
two reviews of it appeared — one in The Spectator 
and one in TJie Atlas. Just a week later came 
out the notice in The Athenceum.i Had the 
writers of these articles been adequate to the task 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



33 



to which they set themselves or to which they 
were set, they could not on the spur of the mo- 
ment have produced anything worthy of con- 
sideration. Still, however futile their criticisms 
were, they were neither vituperative nor con- 
temptuous. The review in The Spectator, which 
was a column long, and silly, and the review in 
The Athenccum, which was only two sentences 
long, but just as silly, though they were unfavor- 
able, contained nothing abusive. In fact, all 
these earliest notices of the poem acknowledged 
the ability of the author. The Atlas, while^,-- 
deeming it unsatisfactory as a whole, declared 
that its writer possessed powers far above the 
ordinary level and eloquence of no common 
order. It cited passages from it solely on ac- 
count of their beauty. 

Even The Atheijccum, which Browning mis- 
takenly assumed to have been the first to review 
" Paracelsus, "did not deny its merit. The critic 
conceded that there was talent in the poem, 
though it was dreamy and obscure — leaving us 
in doubt whether the critic deemed the poem 
dreamy and obscure or the talent. Somewhat 
similar observations, the result of glancing at the 
production and not really reading it, occur oc- 



34 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

casionally even later. "There are many touches 
of beauty, almost Shakespearian, in the work," 
wrote the reviewer in The Metropolitan Magazine 
for October; "but its general tone is homely and 
its contents crude. It is a poem ambitiously un- 
popular." But while notices of this sort are 
found, especially before men had had time to read 
it and study it, there is nowhere any display of a 
contemptuous attitude in any organ of criticism of 
the highest grade, whatever there may have been 
elsewhere. Several of them — like The Literary 
Gazette^ for instance — did not notice it at all. 
But Browning's assertion that the poem was 
laughed to scorn and was denounced as rubbish 
until the appearance of Forster's article receives 
no support from the reviews found in the then 
most authoritative guides of public opinion. 
The general attitude taken by the critics, with 
their hesitating and contradictory pronounce- 
ments, is more accurately set forth by Fox in his 
article on the poem which appeared about two 
months after its publication. "Their verdict," 
he wrote, "is already given in favor of its being 
a work of genius or else a worthless abortion — 
the world may find out which; and when the 
world has found it out, the critics will discover 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



35 



the reasons and set them forth in learned disser- 
tations." * 

Further, if Forster's review established a bar- 
rier sufficient to withstand the raving, roaring 
tide of detraction which had set in against the 
poem, the inundation of disparagement could 
hardly have assumed an overwhelming character 
by the time he had erected it. " Paracelsus" ap- 
peared, as we have seen, in the middle of August, 
1835. Forster's review was pubHshed in The 
Examiner for September 6. Consequently, two 
or three weeks at farthest is all the time that op- 
probrium had to exercise its devastating effect 
before Forster's review checked its further dem- 
onstration. This article indeed is credited by 
Browning himself and by his biographers with 
an almost astounding influence upon public 
opinion. It turns up with regularity in about 
every account of the poet's career which sets 
out to record the reception of this poem. "The 
great event in the history of ' Paracelsus,' " says 
Mrs. Orr, "was John Forster's article in The 
Examiner.'' A statement to the same effect 
is made in the "Personalia" of Mr. Gosse. 
"The Examiner," writes he, "contained a re- 
view of the poem at great length in which 

* The Monthly Repository, November, 1835. 



36 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

full justice was done to Mr. Browning's gen- 
ius." "The Examiner" says Mr. Sharp, "ac- 
knowledged it to be a work of unequivocal 
power and predicted for its author a brilliant 
career." 

Undoubtedly Forster's article up to the date 
of its appearance was far the most outspoken 
in the praise which it gave. It must have been 
all the more grateful to the author, because 
at that time neither he nor his critic had any 
knowledge of each other. It was not, indeed, 
till late in the following December that they met. 
But the review itself never had the influence 
which Browning's friendship for its writer at- 
tributed to it, and which later his biographers 
have conceded to it on his authority. It was 
merely one of several agencies — the greatest of 
which was time — that were working in favor of 
the production. The article in question took up 
three columns o^ The Examiner. Much of it con- 
sisted of extracts from the poem itself, amount- 
ing in all to about one hundred and sixty lines. 
Nor was it unmixed laudation. It conceded 
that some of the passages were tedious and some 
were obscure. But upon the work as a whole it 
bestowed the highest praise. "Since the publi- 
cation of 'Philip Van Artevelde,'" began the 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 37 

review, "we have met with no such evidence of 
poetical genius and of general intellectual power 
as are contained in this volume." The tone of 
what followed coincided with the opening. " It 
is some time since we read a work of more un- 
equivocal power than this," were the words of its 
closing passage. *'We conclude that its author 
is a young man, as we do not recollect his having 
published before. If so, we may safely predict 
for him a brilliant career, if he continues true to 
the present promise of his genius. He possesses 
all the elements of a fine poet." 

This is cordial and, what is better, well-de- 
served praise. But to one familiar with the criti- 
cal literature of all time, and in particular the 
critical literature of that time, it is far from being 
unexampled. Essentially the same words were 
then used in influential journals of works of 
which now the literary antiquary alone knows. 
But Forster's convictions, like those of many 
others, were fortified by further familiarity with 
the poem; and it is not unreasonable to suppose 
that the article of the critic which Browning 
came later to have in mind was not the one which 
appeared in TJiq Examiner, but the long one of 
twenty pages which about eight moiuhs after- 



38 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

ward came out in Colburn's New Monthly Maga- 
zine. ' It was professedly the first number — 
to which no second ever succeeded — of an article 
entitled "Evidences of a New Genius for Dra- 
matic Poetry." The evidence of this genius, it 
asserted, was the little and scantily noticed vol- 
ume of "Paracelsus." 1 he authorship of the 
review was not given, hut was probably well 
known. 1 here was no imcertainty in the utter- 
ance. "Without the slightest hesitation," wrote 
Forster, "we name Mr. Robert Browning at once 
with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. He has 
entitled himself to a place among the acknowl- 
edged poets of the age." 

The criticism was certainly as cordial as it 
was true. Put long before this article appeared, 
heartiest eulogiums had been passed upon the 
work. Fox, to whom it had been shown in 
manuscript, was not behindhand in acknowl- 
edgment both of its promise and performance. 
In Tltr Monthly Repository of November, 1835, 
he gave the fullest expression to his admiration. 
His testimony, sincere as it evidently was, may 
be thought to have been influenced by a desire 
to stand up \'or one of his own contributors; for 

■ For Mairli, 1S3O, vol. XXXVI, p. 288, 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



39 



during that year and the preceding, Browning 
had pubUshed in this periodical several pieces of 
poetry. But no bias from this source can be 
thought to have influenced Leigh Hunt, who in 
this same month of November gave up nine col- 
umns of his 'Journal to a review of the poem, 
supplemented by copious extracts. 

There can be no question that this article was 
the work of the editor himself. "Paracelsus" 
was highly praised in it, and, what is better, 
was sensibly praised. Furthermore, the review, 
friendly as it assuredly was, is particularly worthy 
of attention for the note of warning it contained 
as to the danger the author was exposed to of al- 
lowing his peculiarities of style to degenerate into 
a slovenly mannerism. Two sentences of it, it 
may be well to quote, not merely for the general 
truth they convey, but for the value of their 
special application. "We do not object," wrote 
Hunt, "to his long and often somewhat intri- 
cately involved sentences, or to forms of phrase- 
ology and construction of occasional occurrence, 
which are apt for the moment to perplex and 
startle at the first reading; or to any other devia- 
tions of a similar kind from ordinary usage or the 
beaten highway presented by our books of author- 



40 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

ity on grammar, rhetoric or prosody, in so far 
as such unusual forms are the natural and un- 
affected product of the writer's genius working 
its purposes in its own way. Such distinctive 
characteristics, when we have become familiar 
with them, and they have lost any slight repul- 
siveness with which they may at first have acted 
upon us, even acquire a power of enhancing the 
pleasure we receive from a composition other- 
wise eminently beautiful, and of riveting our love 
for it." What Hunt deprecated was the indul- 
gence in these peculiarities of expression when 
there was nothing to justify them. These words, 
it seems to me, set forth adequately the varying 
effects of Browning's poetry. When his genius 
is at its loftiest, the peculiarities of expression 
enhance the attractiveness of the composition 
and give it increased hold upon our feelings. 
But there was always the tendency to resort to 
these peculiarities when there was nothing in the 
matter to sustain their weight. Consequently, 
when they were not a positive excellence, they 
tended to degenerate into a mere trick of expres- 
sion; and trickery in poetry — I do not use trick- 
ery in a bad sense — carries with it in the end its 
own death-warrant. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 41 

"Paracelsus" was not indeed a work to take 
the public by storm. ;\For its appreciation it re- 
quired close reading and reflection. It would 
have been no wonder, therefore, if the weekly 
purveyors of hasty criticism had sniffled at it 
hesitatingly or sneered at it contemptuously, 
though with opinions of this latter sort it has not 
been my fortune to meet. Most frequently, so 
far as I have observed, they took the safe course 
of noticing it in that perfunctory way which is 
adopted by the writer who seeks not so much to 
conceal his opinions as to conceal the fact that he 
has no opinions. But the more fully men con- 
sider all great work the more fully does its great- 
ness grow upon them. It was so in the case of 
"Paracelsus." As time went on, the notices the 
poem received prove conclusively the increas- 
ing hold it was gaining over the most thoughtful 
class of readers. No adventitious helping hand 
brought this about; it was its own inherent worth. 
I have already asserted that Forster's criticism 
never had the influence upon public opinion 
which Browning's friendship for the critic led 
him to attribute to it. In the very month of 
March in which his second and really enthusi- 
astic article appeared in the New Monthly Maga- 



42 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

zine, and consequently not afFected by it, came 
out a long, elaborate, and cordial review of ** Par- 
acelsus" in the then far more influential Eraser's 
MagazinCy under the title of "Asinarii Scenici" * 
1 he poem was not only praised in the highest 
terms, but its superiority to Taylor's "Philip 
Van Artevelde" was distinctly and even some- 
what aggressively proclaimed; and "Philip Van 
Artevelde" was the one work of that decade 
which in general critical estimate had attained 
highest repute. 

I am not picturing the success of "Paracel- 
sus" as being in the slightest degree overwhelm- 
ing; but so far as it went the success was un- 
equivocal. To this there is further evidence 
which can hardly be gainsaid. In 1842 Richard 
TIengist 1 lorne contributed to a quarterly period- 
ical an article on Browning's poetry. " Its value 
as a truthful record of the reception accorded to 
this particular production is founded on the fact 
that the review was submitted in manuscript to 
the poet himself. Naturally, 1 lorne, like most 
men of that time, looked upon "Paracelsus" as 



» Vol. XI IT. p. 362. 

• Church of England Quarterly Review, October, 1842, vol. XII, 
p. 46.t. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 43 

his earliest work. He discoursed upon the suc- 
cess which had attended this supposedly first vent- 
ure. The restrained way in which he expresses 
himself is evidence that he had no disposition 
to exaggerate or lessen the nature or degree of the 
welcome which had waited upon the young poet. 
"His reception," wrote Hornc, "was compara- 
tively good; we may say very good. Several of 
those periodicals, in which the critics seem dis- 
posed to regard poetry of a superior kind as a 
thing to be respected and studied, hailed the ap- 
pearance of Mr. Robert Browning with all the 
honors which can reasonably be expected to be 
awarded to a new-comer, who is moreover alive. 
In more than one quarter the young poet was 
fairly crowned. Ihe less intelligent class of 
critics spoke of him with praise; guarding their 
expressions with an eye to retreat, if necessary, 
at any future time, made various extracts, and 
set him to grow." 

1 he passages just cited from a notice which 
had passed before its publication under the eye 
of Browning himself give a view of the recep- 
tion of his work a good deal different from that 
for which in certain instances the poet was later 
responsible. There can be no question as to its 



44 ROBERT BROWNING 

correctness. No volume of verse — not even ex- 
cepting "Philip Van Artevelde" — v^as published 
during the fourth decade of the nineteenth cen- 
tury which created a profounder impression than 
did " Paracelsus" upon that body of men who are 
indeed limited in number, but whose verdict is 
the verdict which posterity never undertakes to 
set aside. It led no slight proportion of the 
choicest spirits of the time to display at even 
this early period in his career warmest recog- 
nition of what he had already accomplished and 
to look with hope and expectation upon what 
was reserved for him to achieve in the future. 
It is all-important to bring out this fact sharply, 
because it serves to explain the disappointment 
with which high-wrought anticipation came to 
regard the works of his which immediately suc- 
ceeded, the retrogression that took place in the 
estimate which had begun to be entertained of 
him by the public, and the long period of neglect 
that was to follow. 



II 

"STRAFFORD" AND "SORDELLO" 

Among the men who had been attracted to 
Browning by his "Paracelsus" was the famous 
actor Macready. He was introduced to its 
author at the house of Fox, late in November, 
1835. Under date of December 7, he records in 
his diary that he had read this work. He was 
profoundly impressed by it. There were oc- 
casional obscurities, he conceded; but these 
were more than atoned for by the poetry of 
thought, feeling, and diction which pervaded it. 
**The writer," he added, "can scarcely fail to be 
a leading spirit of his time." Subsequent pe- 
rusal strengthened the first conviction. It ** raises 
my wonder the more I read it," he remarked in 
an entry of several months later. 

The acquaintance thus begun soon ripened in- 
to close friendship. From this time on, up to 
the estrangement which in 1843 attended the pro- 
duction of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon," a good 
deal of our knowledge of Browning's doings 

45 



46 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

come from the references to him in the actor's 
diary. The intimacy that sprang up directed 
to the drama the attention of the young poet. 
Under date of February i6, 1836, Macready re- 
cords that he was visited by Browning in com- 
pany with Forster. They had come to talk with 
him over the plot of a play which the former had 
in mind. The poet told the actor that he had 
been hit by his performance of Othello, and the 
actor told the poet that he hoped that blood 
would come. The subject Browning was then 
contemplating was Narses, the famous general 
of Justinian. But this he gave up. On August 
3, of this same year, Macready tells us that Fors- 
ter had informed him that Browning had settled 
upon Strafford. The subject chosen pleased 
him. "He could not have hit upon one," he 
wrote in his diary, **that I could more readily 
have concurred in." 

It is altogether probable — in fact, it may be 
said to be certain — that Browning's choice of 
this subject was suggested by the aid he had 
been led to give to his friend Forster in his life of 
Strafford. At that time a series of independent 
works were coming out under the general eitle of 
"The Cabinet Cyclopaedia." For this series 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 47 

Forster had agreed to write biographies of several 
of the statesmen connected with the great Puri- 
tan revolution of the seventeenth century. He 
had already completed the life of Sir John Eliot 
which made up the first part of one of the 
contemplated volumes. In it he had again 
shown his zeal for his friend. In the text he 
quoted three or four lines of verse. They were 
taken, he said, from "the poet whose genius 
has just risen amongst us." Then a note was 
appended clearly for the purpose of celebrating 
the writer of the extract. After giving the name 
of the author of "Paracelsus" as the poet al- 
luded to, he went on to say that "there would 
be little danger in predicting that this writer 
will soon be acknowledged as a first-rate poet. 
He has already proved himself one." ^ 

The life of Eliot with that of Strafford was to 
constitute a single volume. For this second 
biography Forster had already made a collection 
of materials and had begun its composition. 
Then he fell ill. The book had been promised 
for a certain date; to finish it at the time spec- 
ified was impracticable. Naturally Forster was 
in a despondent state of mind. In this condition 

* "Eminent British Statesmen," vol. II, p. 104, London, 1836. 



48 TITR EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

Browning found him. He came at once to the 
rescue of his friend and volunteered to do the 
work. The offer was accepted. Browning ac- 
cordingly took the materials which Forster had 
gathered together and proceeded to complete the 
life. In 1836 the volume containing the two 
biographies appeared, but with no hint that 
any one save he whose name was on the title- 
page had anything whatever to do with the 
production of the second one. 

The secret of Browning's share in the prepar- 
ation of the biography was not revealed until 
some years after its supposedly sole author was 
dead. The Browning Society came upon it in 
the course of their probings into all the mysteries 
connected with the poet's career. In 1892 it 
brought out that part of the volume which con- 
tained the life of Strafford as being mainly the 
composition of the poet. The facts which have 
just been given have been largely taken from the 
preface to this reprint. These have been ques- 
tioned by some; by others they have been strenu- 
ously denied. Precisely how much of the com- 
position of the work was Browning's own may 
never be exactly ascertained. But that he had 
nothing to do with it requires ignorance to assert 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 49 

or to accept. Internal evidence is sufficient of 
itself to make clear his participation in the un- 
dertaking. But with this we do not have to con- 
tent ourselves. Those who deny the poet any 
share in the production must be prepared to at- 
tack his veracity. Clearly it was a belief of his 
own that he had a good deal to do with it. Such 
was the impression he conveyed to his future 
wife as the correspondence between them proves 
conclusively.* 

Having chosen Strafford as the subject of his 
drama, Browning worked at it diligently. Be- 
fore the close of the year 1836 he had finished it 
and given it to Macrcady. At first the actor was 
disposed to look with distinct favor upon the 
play. His own attitude of approval extended to 
Osbaldistone, the manager of the theater, to 
whom it was read on March 30, 1837. lie was 
willing to produce it without delay. The ex- 
pectations of its continuous popularity that pre- 
vailed can be inferred from the terms he offered. 
He agreed "to give the author £\2 per night for 
twenty-five nights, and £\o per night for ten 



' Sec in particular in tlic rorrcspondcnrc of Browning anrl Miss 
Barrett the letter of Miss Barrett dated May 36, 1846, vol. II, 
p. 183; of May 30, ill., p. lyo, and of June 6, //)., p. 284. 



50 rilE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

nights beyond." So far everything was favor- 
able. But the more Macready studied the play, 
the less confidence he felt in its excellence for 
stage representation. It became clear to him, 
as time w^ent on, that nothing could save it but 
the acting. That this might possibly carry it to 
the end without disapprobation was the far from 
glowing anticipation of success he set down in 
his diary before the piece was performed. In the 
comments he made there upon the play he in- 
cidentally brings out with distinctness the funda- 
mental difference between the methods adopted 
by Browning and the treatment of a similar sub- 
ject for stage purposes by the supreme English 
dramatist. "In all the historical plays of 
Shakespeare," he observes, "the great poet has 
only introduced such events as act on the indi- 
viduals concerned, and of which they are them- 
selves a part; the persons are all in direct relation 
to each other, and the facts are present to the 
audience. But in Browning's play we have a 
long scene of passion — upon what .? A plan des- 
troyed, by whom or for what we know not, and 
a parliament dissolved, which merely seems to 
inconvenience Strafford in his arrangements." * 

' Diary, April 28, 1837. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



SI 



Macready's fears were realized. Only the 
acting could save it, he thought, and the acting 
did not save it. The characters of Strafford and 
Lady Carlisle w^ere taken respectively by him and 
Helen Faucit. The combination of these two, 
it might seem, would suffice to score a triumph 
for almost any play. Without their support 
"Strafford" would assuredly have been the com- 
pletest of failures. But even with their support 
it was far from being a success. It was chosen 
by Macready for his benefit, and naturally there 
was that night a full house. He seems to have 
made the most that could be made of his part. 
Browning himself was more than satisfied. He 
assured the actor after the rehearsal that it was 
to him "a full recompense for having written the 
play, inasmuch as he had seen his utmost hopes 
of character perfectly embodied." ' 

It was well that the poet had this feeling; for 
it was the principal recompense he received. 
The twenty-five nights of performances, for 
which the manager had agreed to pay twelve 
pounds each, dwindled to a mere fraction of the 
hoped-for number. At the end of the fifth per- 
formance the play was withdrawn. The osten- 

' Macready's Diary, May i, 1837. 



52 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

siblc reason given was the secession of Vanden- 
hofFwho took the part of Pym. Manifestly this 
was but a pretext. It is idle to maintain that the 
withdrawal of a single minor actor, however 
important, could have led to the removal from 
the boards of a play, for the continuance of which 
there was a demand on the part of the public; 
especially as another stood ready at the time to 
take his place. 

The little success of the piece Browning at a 
later period ascribed to the poor performance of 
the minor actors. On this point there was the 
usual diversity of views expressed at the time. 
It is clear that for these subordinates — most of 
whom held respectable, even if not high position, 
on the stage — the play had not the slightest in- 
terest. It could hardly be expected therefore 
that they could make it interesting to others. 
The view taken of them by Browning does not 
seem to be different from that of several con- 
temporary critics wlio, while praising unreserv- 
edly Macready and Helen Faucit, speak of the 
performance of some of the other actors as 
wretched, where it was not abominable. Forster 
especially raged furiously in TJie Examiner. * 

»No. 1527, p. 294, May 7, 1837. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 53 

"Mr. Vandcnhoff," he wrote, "was particularly 
nauseous with his whining, drawling, and slouch- 
ing in Pyin; and Mr. Webster whimpered in 
somewhat too juvenile a fashion through Young 
Vane, Some one should have stepped out from 
the pit and thrust Mr. Dale from the stage." 
This last-named actor was the one who took the 
part of the king. Hiere is assuredly no cpiestion 
that drastic treatment of the kind reconunended 
in his case would have added to the interest of 
the particular performance, whatever might have 
been its effect upon the permanent fortunes of 
the play. 

Forster was indeed the one leading critic who 
remained faithful to this drama while it was alive 
and praised it after it was dead. "Strafford" 
he said in TJic Examiner of the week following, 
"was winning its way into greater success than 
we had hoped for it, bu«- Mr. Vandenhoff's seces- 
sion from the stage has caused its temporary 
withdrawal. It will be only temporary, we trust; 
no less in justice to the great genius of the author 
than to the fervid applause with which its last 
performance was received by an admirably filled 
house." His opinion of the favor it had won 
could hardly have been that of those who, out- 



54 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

side of the author, were most interested in its 
success. Macready's view of the situation we 
have no means of knov/ing definitely; for be- 
yond the record of its initial performance, no 
later reference to the play, no criticism of it, 
has been permitted to appear in his diary as 
published. But his real opinion of it can be in- 
ferred from his action. He made no attempt to 
revive it that season, as Forster had hoped, 
though his then intimate friendship with the 
author would have led him to take such a course, 
had he shared in the sentiments of the critic about 
its prospects of success. The temporary with- 
drawal of "Strafford" became, indeed, eternal. 
During his many years of acting that followed, 
Macready never brought it again upon the stage. 
All contemporary accounts are practically 
unanimous in the view that "Strafford" was a 
failure. Even Forster, who put the best possible 
face upon the matter, conceded that it would not 
take permanent hold upon the stage. It is idle 
to pretend that this agreement of opinion was due 
to any hostility on the part of the critics. So 
little was there of this feeling that almost every- 
where a genuine desire existed that the play 
should succeed. There is in truth a tone of re- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 55 

gretful disappointment in several of the notices 
which it received. The critics came prepared to 
praise; they wanted to praise; nothing but their 
greater or less conscientiousness stood in the way 
of their praising. This desire of seeing the 
tragedy successful was mainly due to the steadily 
growing partiality in Browning's favor which had 
been produced by ''Paracelsus" upon the more 
cultivated class of minds. No one can read 
many of the contemporary notices of the per- 
formance of " Strafford" without becoming aware 
of how high was the anticipation of it raised by 
the previous work, and how keen was the dis- 
appointm.ent that its author had in this later one 
failed to come up to the expectation entertained. 
The conviction, however, was general that in- 
stead of showing an advance in achievement it 
indicated decided retrogression. 

There is an account of the performance of the 
opening night in the autobiography of the con- 
temporary artist and poet, William Bell Scott. 
It occurs incidentally in his mention of Leigh 
Hunt. "On the first interview, I think, it was," 
he wrote, "he told me of Browning's play of 
'Strafford' being placed on the stage. This was 
on the first of May, 1837. My admiration for 



56 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

* Paracelsus' was so great I determined to go and 
applaud without rhyme or reason; and so I did, 
in front of the pit. From the first scene it be- 
came plain that applause was not the order. 
The speakers had every one of them orations 
to deliver, and no action of any kind to perform. 
The scene changed, another door opened, and 
another half-dozen gentlemen entered as long- 
winded as the last. Still, I kept applauding with 
some few others, till the howling was too over- 
powering and the disturbance so considerable 
that for a few minutes I lost my hat. The truth 
was that the talk was too much the same and 
too much in quantity; it was no use continuing 
to hope something would turn up to surprise the 
house." ' 

Apparently this is an exaggerated account of 
the ill success which attended the performance of 
the play on the opening night. But the motives 
given by the writer for going is another of the 
many proofs of the high position which his pre- 
vious work had already given Browning. It 
shows, too, how much that poem had done and 
was doing for his reputation that the play of 
**StrafFord" was published before it was performed 

' William Bell Scott's "Autobiographic Notes," vol. I, p. 124. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 57 

as being "by the author of 'Paracelsus.'" It 
came out at the end of April. Furthermore, it 
was thought worthy of being made the subject 
of a generally favorable criticism in the Edin- 
burgh Review. To us at this day the article 
which then appeared furnishes somewhat amus- 
ing reading, for it attributes to alterations made 
by Macready, and not to the poet himself, the 
abrupt transitions, the disjointed sentences, the 
conveyance of meaning by starts and jerks, 
which we all recognize now as peculiar character- 
istics of Browning's style. But the very fact 
that the Scottish quarterly thought it worth while 
to review the drama meant then a great deal 
more than we conceive of now. That stately 
periodical, though shorn of much of its influence, 
still retained something of the glamour of its 
original dignity. It occasionally took up some 
really or presumably inferior work for the sake 
of scoring it; but in the way of praise, it had too 
much regard for its position to take serious notice 
of any new writer who w^as not regarded as of 
great promise or of any work which was not in 
some way deemed of distinct importance. It 
was years after this before it condescended to re- 
view Tennyson at all. Even then the writer of 



58 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

the article was cautioned against going so far as 
to commit the periodical by the bestowal of too 
much praise. 

It is to be kept in mind that we have been dis- 
cussing the play here not as a specimen of Eng- 
lish literature, but as a contribution to the acting 
drama. Yet in the former capacity it is no more 
a success than it was in the latter. On the stage, 
Macready and Helen Faucit could not keep it 
from being a failure. It is equally a failure in 
the closet. As the men concerned in the per- 
formance of it did not find it interesting, so did 
not those who set out to read it. The inability 
has continued. The enjoyment of its perusal is 
confined mainly to those devotees of the poet 
whose cardinal principle is apparently to admire 
that portion of his production which the rest of 
the world deems unendurable. Men read it 
now, so far as they read it at all, from a sense 
of duty; they do not read it for pleasure. The 
main difficulty with it is its utter lack of interest. 
We care little for the characters in the tragedy or 
the fate that befalls them. Several of them are 
little more than lay-figures with names attached 
to them; and one could frequently be substi- 
tuted for the other and neither hearer nor reader 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 59 

would be conscious of any impropriety. Straf- 
ford's devotion to the king who deserts him ex- 
cites Httle respect. In one of his character it 
lacks dignity; for it is not the attitude of a man 
which is portrayed, but that of a woman whose 
conduct is under the control of her feelings. The 
love part furnished by Lady Carlisle is insignifi- 
cant; but insignificant as it is, it is too much. It 
appeals as little to the audience to whom it is re- 
vealed as it does to the one person of the drama 
from whom it is carefully kept; and so long as 
it is kept from him, it had no business to be in 
the play at all. 

" Strafford" has, however, a certain importance 
in Browning's literary career, not because of the 
importance it has in itself, but because it marks 
his entrance into dramatic composition. The 
plays he wrote during his life were seven. From 
the number specified are intentionally excluded 
"Pippa Passes" and "In a Balcony," which are 
dramatic dialogues and not dramas proper. All 
of these seven belong to the earlier period of his 
career which is here under consideration; only 
three of them have ever been brought out upon 
the regular stage. Accordingly it may be well to 
consider at this point the poet's position as a 



6o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

dramatist. For his rank in that class the most 
extravagant claims have been advanced, espe- 
cially of late years. More than once v^e have 
been assured that he is the greatest of English 
dramatists since Shakespeare. However opin- 
ions may differ on that point, all will agree 
that there is one respect in which his fortunes 
bear no striking resemblance to those of the great 
Elizabethan. Contemporary evidence is ample 
to show that Shakespeare was the most popular 
playwright of his time. His plays held the stage 
then; they have continued to hold it ever since. 

The modern advocates of Browning as a great 
dramatic poet do not venture to maintain that 
either of these facts is true of the plays of his 
that have been produced on the stage. Instead 
they content themselves with insisting that on 
their first representation they did as well as the 
average; that it was due to unforeseen and un- 
expected agencies that they did not gain at the 
time the full meed of popular favor; and, further- 
more, the reports that they actually failed were 
and are malicious misstatements. They have 
this justification for what they say of this sort 
that the belief they express is based largely upon 
utterances of Browning himself, when in later 



(;/'■ ROBERT BROWNING 6i 

life a treacherous memory led him to put forth 
some remarkable statements about his plays, 
which bear but a remote resemblance to the 
truth. But even were we to concede the correct- 
ness of the attempts to explain the lack of success 
of these pieces in the past, they do not account for 
the fact that they do not hold the stage in the 
present, and that they give no sign of holding it 
in the future. They may be acted at intervals. 
Through adventitious circumstances they may 
occasionally perhaps meet with a sort of quali- 
fied favor. But no popular demand exists for 
them. When announced the interest they arouse 
is that of curiosity or partisanship. This is 
amply sufficient to explain whatever success 
Helen Faucit had with "Colombe's Birthday," in 
1853, or Lawrence Barrett with *'A Blot i' the 
'Scutcheon," in the season of 1884-85. 

The truth is that so far from being a great 
dramatist, second only to Shakespeare, Browning, 
in the proper sense of the word, is no dramatist at 
all. No great poet who has set out to write plays 
has failed more signally than he in mastering the 
technique of the art. None has shown so little 
comprehension of those details of expression, 
construction, and arrangement which unite to 



62 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

make a play successful on the stage. Nor was 
he in the shghtest degree incHned to defer to the 
opinions of those who knew from practical ex- 
perience the methods best calculated to appeal 
to an audience. His dramas throughout exhibit 
vital defects as acting plays. They lack organic 
unity and order, and what we may call inevitable 
development. What is further unsatisfactory in 
them is the utter inadequacy of their portrayal 
of human nature, and too frequently their un- 
faithfulness to it. But, so far as the average 
theater-goer is concerned, worse than anything 
else, is their lack of sustained interest. Power- 
ful passages appear in them; but no play can be 
kept alive merely by powerful passages. Above 
all, so far as regards representation, the impos- 
sibility of comprehending the conversation and 
consequently of following the course of what little 
action there is, without effort which must occa- 
sionally be almost agonizing in its intensity, — 
this of itself will always make them failures up- 
on the stage. 

I am doing no injustice to Browning in say- 
ing — for more than once he practically intimated 
it himself — that in his writing he went upon the 
theory that the reader has no rights which the 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 63 

author is bound to respect. It was the business 
of the former to comprehend. No duty rested 
upon the latter to make himself comprehensible, 
at least easily comprehensible. This naturally 
did not lead to his ready or cordial acceptance by 
the public. But if such was his attitude toward 
the reader, who has leisure to turn back, to com- 
pare and to reflect, we can imagine what would 
be the result in the case of the hearer who must 
catch at once the meaning of what is uttered, 
whose attention must be so constantly directed 
to what is said and done at the moment that 
neither time nor opportunity is afforded to con- 
sider what has gone before. There is, indeed, 
no great play in which at the first hearing, as at 
the first reading, something will not be found to 
have escaped the attention of the most observant. 
There will be sentences of which he will not 
get the exact purport. But in the case of the 
genuine dramatist these occasional failures to 
comprehend the full meaning of particular lines 
do not interfere with the comprehension of the 
work as a whole or even of any of its details. 
The broad general effects will be as perceptible at 
the first hearing as they will be at the hundredth. 
That this should be so is a necessary require- 



64 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

ment for success. But so little was this elemen- 
tary consideration heeded by Browning, so little 
did he try to conform to it, that often a new sen- 
tence demanded the attention of the hearer be- 
fore he had fully mastered the purport of the one 
it succeeded. To such an extent was this car- 
ried that one of the critics of the first perform- 
ance of " Strafford,'* who though not favorable 
was by no means disposed to be censorious, 
discovered, as he tells us, that "the best way of 
obtaining an impression of what was going on 
was to take care not to follow the speech too 
closely, but to hear the opening of a sentence 
and supply the remainder by imagination." * 

It is no marvel therefore that Browning's plays 
did not succeed. They are often hard to follow 
in the closet; on the stage it is impossible to fol- 
low them. The truth is that his forte did not lie 
at all in the drama. It is in dramatic monologue 
alone that he achieved success. In that he has 
no superior in our literature; we may almost say 
he has no equal. But the dramatic monologue 
is only allied to the drama; it is not the drama 
itself. It is confined to the revelation exhibited 
in pure soliloquy, or to soliloquy broken only by 

^ Atliourunt, May (>, i8_^7, p. 331. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 65 

occasional interrogation. Without speaking of 
any otlur of its various failures to meet the re- 
quirements of stage representation, it excludes 
action entirely. Hut action is a cardinal dis- 
tinction of the drama proper: it is essential to its 
very existence. Herein Browning failed com- 
pletely. The characters in his plays are as a 
rule so much taken up with talking ahout every- 
thing in general that they have hardly leisure left 
to do anything in particular. They discuss their 
feelings instead of being inspired by them; and 
in discussing them they forget the hearer who is 
waiting for something to hajipen. Fhe born 
dramatist, like the orator, has his eye always up- 
on the audience. This was the particular class 
of persons from whom Browning kept his eyes 
steadily averted. His plays therefore are to be 
read and studied; they are not to be witnessed. 
Not one of them complies with the canons of 
effective stage representation. In order to rank 
him in this class of writers, his partisans have to 
invent a distinction between dramatic authors 
and playwrights which seems based upon the 
theory that a genuine dramatic author can not 
produce a play which an ordinary audience can 
endure. 



66 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

But the belief that Browning is a great drama- 
tist, that it is a distinct mark of highest cultiva- 
tion to enjoy the performance of his plays has 
now become with many a faith which must be 
lived for, and if necessary be died for. The in- 
tensity of this feeling can be gaged by the fact 
that it sometimes survives the actual experience 
of seeing them acted. It is the proud boast of 
his extremest partisans that his dramatic writ- 
ings do not appeal to the multitude. Hence, 
there is little opportunity for even the elect to 
witness their representation save by being per- 
mitted to share in the intellectual feasts of this 
sort which are occasionally provided in the pri- 
vate retreats of his special admirers. At times 
in our lives most of us are called upon to partici- 
pate in gatherings of various kinds whose pro- 
fessed aim is to improve the individual and to 
elevate humanity as a whole. Very rarely do 
such gatherings conduce to hilarity. But among 
the countless entertainments of this sort which 
are apparently devised to impart additional 
gloom to life, there seems to me nothing quite 
so depressing as the performance of a Browning 
play by amateurs. Actor and auditor alike come 
to the sacrifice weighed down with a sense of re- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 67 

sponsibility for the success of this mission of do- 
ing and suffering. Especially on the faces of the 
hearers assembled can be seen that look of min- 
gled resolution and resignation which almost 
defiantly proclaims the fixed determination, 
come what may, to be uplifted and inspired. 
True it is, frivolous and light-minded persons 
may be found who attend merely to see and to be 
seen. But the frivolity and gayety of these in- 
truders make no head-way against the all-per- 
vading seriousness of those who have assembled 
to bear aloft the gonfalon of culture pure and un- 
defiled. The most scoffing spectator comes 
soon to feel that he is assisting at a solemn rite, in 
which the hierophants interpret to the worship- 
pers the message to his generation — to use the 
now conventional phrase — which Browning has 
delivered. It is fair to say, however, that the 
ceremonial, dispiriting as it may be, is attended 
with none of the repulsive features which are apt 
to characterize all other forms of human sacri- 
fice; for the victims not only welcome their 
martyrdom but are transported with the joy of 
being immolated. The chastened but exalted 
mood in which they receive the message may 
perhaps be best indicated in the words of a fern- 



68 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

inine enthusiast, who, in a burst of confidence 
after one of these trying ordeals, said to me as a 
supposed devotee, "If we did not know how 
splendid this whole thing is, what a horrible bore 
we should think it to be." 

To mark distinctly the contrast between a great 
poet and a great poet who is also a great play- 
wright, nothing can be supplied more convincing 
than a comparison of "Luria" with "Othello" 
Nothing more clearly reveals the limitations of 
the modern author and his lack of insight into 
the nature of successful stage representation. 
In writing this tragedy, Browning had before his 
eyes the corresponding work of Shakespeare. 
His Luria, as he phrased it himself, belongs to 
Othello's country. The leading characters of 
both plays are Moors — Moors, too, of highest 
intellectual and moral endowment, simple- 
hearted, unskilled in craft, doing everything in 
honor. Both, too, are in the service of Italian 
states. Both finally commit suicide. There 
the resemblance ceases between the plays. In 
the one action hurries on from beginning to end; 
in the other action stands still while declamation 
rages unchecked. Out of several characteristics of 
"Luria,"one may be worth pointing out because 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 69 

it vitally concerns the interest of the play for rep- 
resentation before an English audience. Hardly 
a personage in it contents himself with making a 
serious speech of less than a dozen lines, while 
most of them need three or four times that num- 
ber to express themselves satisfactorily. The 
play accordingly is not made up of dialogues but 
of a succession of monologues. 

The lack of the instinct for dramatic propriety 
reaches, however, far deeper than neglect of 
characteristics which go to render a play success- 
ful upon the stage. Othello is acted upon by in- 
fluences we all recognize; he exhibits feelings 
with which we all sympathize, and the deed 
which ends his life is to us a natural solution of 
the difficulties into which he has been betrayed. 
In Browning's play it requires protracted thought 
to perceive any reason for the behavior of the 
characters; and Luria himself finally commits 
suicide without other justification for so doing 
save that he, while acting with perfect loyalty, 
is distrusted by the city which employs him. 
Browning's future wife, whose critical acumen 
was as much superior to her husband's as her 
creative power was inferior, naturally objected 
to this way of disposing of the protagonist of his 



70 THE EARLY LITER^iRY CAREER 

drama. It struck her as ignoble and unheroical. 
It is curious to read Browning's own explanation 
of the reasons that led him to resort to the cheap 
expedient of suicide — a device, it may be added, 
to which he was always too much addicted for 
getting rid of his characters. It was a very just 
objection which Macready made to the ending 
of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." "Observe only," 
the poet wrote, "that Luria would stand, if I 
have plied him effectually with adverse influ- 
ences, in such a position as to render any other 
end impossible without hurt to Florence, which 
his religion is to avoid inflicting — passively 
awaiting, for instance, the sentence and punish- 
ment to come at night, would as surely inflict it 
as taking part with her foes. His aim is to pre- 
vent the harm she will do herself by striking him, 
so he moves aside from the blow." 

Contrast Luria's motives for the final act as 
set forth by Browning with those indicated by 
the great dramatist for a similar ending. In the 
case of Othello, there is scarcely anything else 
left for him to do. His life has centred itself 
in his love for Desdemona. The belief in her 
revolt, which his simple nature has been worked 
upon to accept, causes him to care no more for 



OF ROBERT BROWNING yi 

what has been to him life's supremest joy. The 
supposed knowledge of her unfaithfulness leads 
him to destroy the one being whom he finds out 
too late to have been his own in thought and 
heart and deed. When he comes to learn the 
real truth, it is not loss of honor which afflicts 
him; it is not the attitude of Venice toward 
himself that disturbs him. It is that through 
his own credulous and unreasoning suspicion 
everything has gone which for him has made life 
worth living. To take himself out of it seems 
the natural and only solution of the difficulties 
with which he finds himself environed, the only 
mode of relief from the agony he endures, the 
only possible expiation he can make for the crime 
he has committed. We are therefore not as- 
tounded by his act because daily we see similar 
conditions followed by the same result. 

But in the case of Luria, the reason given for 
suicide is more than inadequate; it is almost en- 
titled to be termed ridiculous. Why does he 
destroy himself.? He has served the state with 
absolute fidelity. Though watched by its jeal- 
ous spies, he has resisted all inducements to 
avenge himself for the imputations cast upon 
his loyalty and honor. Yet his devotion can not 



72 THE EARLY LITEIbiRY CAREER 

ward off the desire to strike him, if it can ward 
off the attempt itself. So, as Browning expresses 
it, he moves aside from the blow. The moving 
aside from it is a delicate way of saying that he 
proceeds to take poison. Paying no heed to 
every other consideration of the merits or defects 
of this tragedy, its unfitness for stage representa- 
tion is evidenced by the method taken to con- 
clude it. To expect a miscellaneous audience to 
sympathize with a piece of overstrained senti- 
ment like this — a great and victorious general, 
with an army devoted to him personally, led to 
destroy himself on the very eve of his final 
triumph, in consequence of his feelings having 
been hurt on learning that the city to whose in- 
terests he has been uniformly loyal, has come to 
distrust him and is planning to destroy him — 
to expect sympathy with a course of conduct 
which is even more unnatural, if possible, than 
it is irrational, could never enter the mind of a 
dramatist who sought to portray life as it is and 
men as they are. 

The most damaging thing that could be said 
against "Strafford" was that it indicated a lack 
of that dramatic skill which enables a writer to 
construct a successful acting play. But one can 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 73 

be a great poet without being a great dramatic 
poet. Browning's next venture was in his favor- 
ite analysis of character. It was a production 
which he had long been contemplating, and upon 
which, with frequent interruptions, he had long 
been working. It is sometimes stated — I know 
not on what authority — that it was begun in 
1838. Yet unless I am grossly mistaken, "Sor- 
dello " is the work to which he alludes in the pref- 
ace to the original edition of " Paracelsus." Be 
that as it may, we know that it was advertised 
on one of the leaves of the published play of 
*' Strafford" as then nearly ready. We know 
further from the diary of Harriet Martineau that 
on December 23, 1837, Browning told her that 
the poem in question would soon be done;* and 
that on April 11 of the year following, he called 
upon her just before leaving for Venice whither 
he was going ip order to get a view of the locali- 
ties mentioned in it.^ 

However uncertain the time of composition, 
there is not as much vagueness in our knowl- 
edge of that, as there is in our knowledge of the 



' " Memorials of Harriet Martineau," by Maria Weston Chap- 
man, in Autobiography of, Boston, 1877, vol. II, P.-325. 
2 Ibid., p. 337. 



74 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

hero of the poem. Here it suffices to say that 
he was a troubadour of the thirteenth century, 
the mention of whom by Dante, in the " Purga- 
torio" has assured him of a wider recognition 
than has been gained for him by the Httle which 
has been preserved of his own writings. So far, 
in truth, as the value of Browning's production is 
concerned, the Sordello of history may be dis- 
missed from consideration. The actual fort- 
unes of the hero were of the sHtrhtest account in 
the scope of the work. This is true also of the 
various other characters introduced into it. 
They serve little other purpose than to give an 
air of actuality to the events described as tak- 
ing place. But the poem itself. Browning em- 
phatically declared, was nothing more than a 
study in the development of a soul. Accord- 
ingly it was from this point of view alone that he 
wished it to be judged. 

"Strafford" had been a disappointment. The 
faults of "Paracelsus" had been there exhibited 
in an aggravated form, while the beauties of that 
work were conspicuously absent. But the de- 
scent in popular estimate due to the play was 
nothing compared to that caused by the poem 
which followed it. Perhaps there is no in- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 75 

Stance in literary history of an author who pro- 
ceeded to destroy his own reputation with more 
systematic endeavor than did Browning in the 
composition of "Sordello." Certainly never 
were efforts of that sort attended with more 
overwhelming success. Nothing was neglected. 
''Paracelsus" had at times presented difficulties 
to the most thoughtful reader. But to thought- 
ful and thoughtless alike "Sordello" presented 
nothing else. Both to those who gave them- 
selves up to its careful or careless perusal, it 
was very much in the situation of the earth as 
recorded in the story of the creation. It was 
without form and void and darkness was on the 
face of the deep. Mad the earth been left in 
that state, it would have been found uninhabit- 
able. "Sordello" was left in that state, and it 
was found unreadable. 

We are now frequendy assured that Browning 
is not really obscure at all. The fault is not with 
him, but with us. The idea that such a charge 
can be made against "Sordello" in particular, we 
are led by one of the poet's biographers to be- 
lieve, indicates a mental obliquity so dense that 
it amounts almost to moral perversity. It is in 
the following glowing terms that the late Mr. 



76 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

William Sharp, in his Hfe of the poet, expressed 
his indignation at any assertion of the sort. 
"Surely," he exclaimed, "this question of 
Browning's obscurity was expelled to the limbo 
of dead stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in peri- 
ods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of 
Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous in- 
cidental passage on Chapman." 

To him who has full faith in the view pro- 
pounded by the biographer, it is somewhat de- 
pressing to find him a little later in the same vol- 
ume inferentially relegating to a habitation in 
this limbo of dead stupidities the opinions of 
Douglas Jerrold, Tennyson, and the Carlyles. 
He tells us that they actually professed them- 
selves unable to understand. From his later 
utterances it is plain that Carlyle indeed fully 
sympathized with his wife, who said that she had 
read the poem through without being able to 
make out whether Sordello was a man, a city, 
or a book. The story of Jerrold is too well known 
to bear recounting in full, and I refer to it in pass- 
ing mainly because of the attitude toward it of 
Browning himself. Given "Sordello" to read 
while recovering from a severe illness, Jerrold 
after wrestling with it for a while sank back in de- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 77 

spair in his bed with the exclamation, "O God, I 
am an idiot!" The poet used to enjoy narrating 
this incident, though naturally he took the ground 
that there was no justification for the feeling. 
Yet it must fairly be conceded that none of the 
persons just mentioned can be deemed much in- 
ferior to the average extoller of Browning's clear- 
ness; collectively they might even be considered 
equal to the Swinburne-Sharp combination of in- 
tellectual astuteness and resplendent rhetoric. 

This contemporary inability to understand 
and appreciate "Sordello" has been explained 
by some Browning enthusiasts as due to the fact 
that the public of the time in which it appeared 
was not intellectually athletic enough to grapple 
with its difficulties. To overcome these was 
needed the virile mental vigor of our own more 
robust generation. Accordingly we can look 
down with complacency as well as compassion 
upon the failure to comprehend of still others of 
those frailer spirits of the past who retired baffled 
before what is to us so easy. One of these gentle 
souls was Harriet Martineau. She had been 
captivated by "Paracelsus." In her autobiog- 
raphy she tells us that the poem having been lent 
her, she, for the first time in her life, passed a 



78 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

night without sleeping a wink in consequence of 
reading a portion of it before going to bed. But 
"Sordello" she found not conducive to wakeful- 
ness. The attempted reading of it had made 
Jerrold fear for his sanity; it made her fear for 
her health. **I was so wholly unable to under- 
stand it," she writes, "that I supposed myself 
ill." Had she been really taken ill, it would have 
appeared a just punishment for the advice she 
had given the poet in this interview of the 23d of 
December, 1837, already mentioned. He told 
her then that not only "Sordello" would soon be 
done, but that he had come to the conclusion to 
deny himself preface and notes, as he must choose 
between being historian or poet, and therefore 
could not split the interest. She confirmed him 
in this attitude. "I advised him," she said, "to 
let the poem tell its own tale." Accordingly, it was 
sent forth in its native obscurity. Rather than 
not split the interest, no interest was left to split. 
Charles Kingsley must also be included among 
the contemporary stupids. Haifa score of years 
later than "Sordello," his "Alton Locke" was 
published. In it the hero is represented by the 
novelist as giving an account of the conversation 
he holds with the girl of higher station with whom 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 79 

he is in love. "She talked," he says, "about 
poetry, Tennyson, and Wordsworth; asked me 
if I understood Browning's "Sordello"; — and 
she comforted me, after my stammering con- 
fession that I did not, by telling me that she was 
delighted to hear that; for she did not under- 
stand it either and it was pleasant to have a 
companion in ignorance." Even earlier than 
this Lowell had relegated his personal opinion 
to this limbo of dead stupidities. In a review 
of Browning's works, which was published in 
1848, he gave the most cordial of recognitions to 
the genius of the poet — at a time, too, when 
such recognition was far from frequent in his 
own country. But while conceding the excel- 
lence of detached passages in "Sordello" he 
pointed out its formlessness and the inadequacy 
of its workmanship. "It was a fine poem," he 
said, "before the author wrote it." His general 
opinion as to its obscurity he had no hesitation 
in expressing. "We may as well say bluntly,'* 
he remarked, "it is totally incomprehensible as 
a connected whole." ' 

There is even a sadder story to be told of the 
impression produced by this work. Among those 

* North A merican Review for April, i'848. 



8o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

who lacked then the requisite insight now so 
common among the poet's devotees must be 
reckoned the woman who was in a short time to 
become his wife. She had hailed Browning be- 
fore she knew him personally as the King of the 
Mystics. During the year before her marriage, 
when friendship was ripening into love, she ad- 
mitted his obscurity — not, indeed, on the subject 
of his feelings toward herself personally, in re- 
gard to which from a very early period of their 
acquaintance Browning seems to have ex- 
hibited so little of his usual obscurity that he 
fairly terrified her at first by his clearness. Miss 
Barrett at that time confessed to a correspondent 
that she herself was guilty of the sin of Sphinxine 
literature, and had struggled hard to renounce it. 
"Do you know," she added plaintively, "I have 
been told that / have written things harder to in- 
terpret than Browning himself.'' — only I can not, 
can not believe it — he is so very hard." * To the 
same friend she declared that "Sordello" had 
many fine things, and was well worthy of study, 
and, indeed, very peculiarly in need of study. 
She would not therefore recommend its perusal, 

' "The Letters of Elizabeth Brownhig," New York, 1898, vol. I, 
p. 254. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 8l 

though she was eager to have him read "Para- 
celsus." "Sordello," she remarked, had been 
thrown down by many as unintelligible, and had 
been retained by herself as a specimen of the 
Sphinxine literature in all its power. Under the 
circumstances, this obtuseness may be forgiven 
her. Mr. Swinburne's essay on Chapman had 
not been written at that time, and in consequence 
she could not well have been expected to know 
better. 

If these were the feelings of contemporaries 
who were the most eminent in the literary world, 
we can get some idea of the state of mind of the 
ordinary critic at the time the poem appeared. 
It is putting it mildly to say that he was dum- 
founded. ''Sordello" came out at the very end 
of February. Then as now the leading periodi- 
cals which devoted themselves more or less to 
literary criticism were frequently, if not regularly, 
furnished with advance copies. Consequently it 
was not unusual for them to review books as 
soon as they were nominally published. But 
hardly anything of the kind took place now. 
The critical journals were either silent, or they 
waited. The Spectator was the only important 
weekly that gave immediate attention to the 



82 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

work; but that it was enabled to do by its treat- 
ment of it. It went on the principle that it is not 
necessary to wade all through a mud-puddle to 
become aware that it is a mud-puddle. "What 
this poem may be in its extent," it observed, "we 
are unable to say, for we cannot read it. What- 
ever may be the poetical spirit of Browning, it is 
so overlaid In 'Sordcllo' by digression, affecta- 
tion, obscurity, and all the faults that spring, it 
would seem, from crudity of plan and self-opin- 
ion, which will neither cull thoroughly nor revise 
composition, that the reader — at least the reader 
of our stamp — turns away." Two weeks later 
The Atlas paid attention to the poem. Its critic 
had been an ardent admirer of what was then 
deemed Browning's first work. But in "Sor- 
dcllo" he was utterly disappointed, and ex- 
pressed with earnestness his disapproval. It 
was worse, he said, than "Strafford." That 
drama had shown a descent from the high prom- 
ise of "Paracelsus." In this third production, 
however, all the faults of the first were exhibited 
in an intensified form, without the compensation 
of an equal amount of excellence in any single 
point of view.- 

' March 28, 1840. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 83 

Neither the Literary Gazette nor Hie Examiner 
reviewed the poem at all. In the case of the lat- 
ter the omission was peculiarly significant. We 
know from notices written hy Forstcr of certain 
of Browning's later work that"SorcleIlo" was too 
much for even that faithful and devoted friend. 
He clearly did not feel it in his power to speak 
well of it; therefore he chose to say nothing at all. 
The only review which seems to have been the 
result of an effort, honest whether adequate or 
inadequate, to penetrate into the meaning of the 
poem, was thatwhich appeared in TheAthcnceum. 
This, however, did not come out till three months 
later. The criticism, though the fruit of careful 
study and of arduous and it might almost be said 
of indignant industry, was hardly more favorable 
than the others. It spoke in the severest terms 
of the mannerisms found in the poem, of its 
peculiarities of language, of its disregard of 
euphony, of its occupying the reader's attention 
with novelties of construction which he must mas- 
ter in order to grasp the meaning lost to appre- 
hension in cloudy depths. It further censured 
the oracular utterances which turned out when 
unwrapped from their profusion of words to be 
nothing more than commonplace truths. I am 



84 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

here stating the critic's point of view, not up- 
holding its correctness. But whether the judg- 
ment be true or false it is worth quoting as seem- 
ingly the only contemporary notice of the work 
in which a serious attempt was made to study it 
as a whole/ 

So much for the estimate of "Sordello" taken 
at the time by the leading critical authorities. 
Few as have been the citations given, they may 
be safely regarded as fairly representative of 
general contemporary opinion. If a favorable 
word can be found for the work in any quarter, 
even the obscurest, it seems to have escaped so far 
the hardest search. Certain it is that Browning 
did all that lay in his power to make difficult the 
comprehension of the poem; at least he omitted 
to do anything that would render its compre- 
hension easier. All the usual, not to say neces- 
sary, helps were left unprovided. Let us con- 
sider as a single item the historical settins:. The 
action of the poem takes place in Italy in the 
earlier half of the thirteenth century. In this 
remote period, in the history of a foreign land, 
the events which form the background consist of 
nothing more important than the petty feuds 

* Athenaum, May 3, 1840. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 85 

which went on in the ItaHan cities between the 
adherents of the Pope and of the Emperor. The 
contests of these factions often deserve Milton's 
characterization of the bickerings between the 
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, that it was as worth 
while to chronicle the wars of kites and crows 
flocking and fighting in the air. No one but a 
special student of the period would or could know 
the details, or form any conception of the char- 
acters whose names flit to and fro across the 
pages of the poem. 

Yet the account of the mental struggles Sor- 
dello is represented as undergoing presuppose 
some knowledge of the facts both of his personal 
career and of the events in which he took part. 
If this knowledge does not exist or is not fur- 
nished, the reader is confused at the very outset 
by the mention of names about whose owners the 
story gives no light, and by allusions to incidents 
of which he is almost inevitably in the blindest 
ignorance. They have not much bearing, it can 
justly be said, upon the development of the 
hero's soul. So much the more reason was there 
that these obstacles in the way of comprehension 
should have been removed. The very briefest 
outline of the facts referred to or mentioned, the 



86 T1IK RARLY LITKRARY CAREER 



very briefest account of the personages and places 
introduced would have given the reader a van- 
tage-ground from which to attack the other dif- 
fuiilrics of the poem. Such a course would cer- 
tainly have prevented Mrs. Carlyle from being 
in doubt whether Sordello was a man, a city, or 
a book. 

But Browning was far from pandering to that 
depraved taste which hungered and thirsted for 
useful information, lie disdained to impart it. 
The facts contained or referred to in the poem 
were, he said, of no importance in themselves as 
regards the main idea he had in mind. At any 
rare the reader ought to be ashamed of himself 
for not knowing them. Such was his attitude, 
nor only in rhe case of rhis work, but of several 
which appeared subsequently. He accordingly 
condescended to cast no light upon "Sordello." 
The only assistance allorded later to its compre- 
hension was rhe running title at the head of each 
page. These are not to be found in the original 
edition. They are at rimes so much a help rhat 
one naturally waxes indignant that a help of this 
sort should be needed at all; for the obscurity 
which envelops rhe work as a whole extends con- 
stantly to details. For illustration, there is in 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 87 

the opening book an apostrophe to some poet, 
whom he asks this time to come not near and 
thereby scare him with his pure face. There is 
nothing in the text to indicate who is the person 
here addressed. Scores of writers might be 
guessed by those ignorant of Browning's special 
likes and disHkes; and in that condition must be 
assumed to have been nearly all the readers he 
was then likely to have. The running title now 
on the page following dispels the doubt. It is 
headed "Shelley departing, Verona appears." 
This enables us to see who it is that the author 
had in mind; but such an illegitimate way of 
imparting needed information is not the way for 
him to follow who writes to be understood. 

To the very end of his days, however, Brown- 
ing never swerved from the belief that he himself 
was not in the slightest degree responsible for the 
failure of this poem — for the failure of people to 
buy it, or of people to understand it who did buy 
it. In the case of any one of his works, indeed, 
he was inclined to be impatient with those who 
hinted that labor spent upon Its correction might 
result in adding to its intelligibility. As regards 
"Sordello," however, once he paid heed to a sug- 
gestion of this sort. It came from' the woman 



8S THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

who was soon to give him the promise of becom- 
ing his wife. In September, 1845, she made use 
of the influence she had already acquired and 
urged him to recast the poem. ''It is," she 
wrote, "like a noble picture with its face to the 
wall just now, or at least in the shadow." It 
needed drawing together and fortifying in the 
connections and associations, "which," she 
added, "hang as loosely every here and there as 
those in a dream, and confound the reader who 
persists in thinking himself awake." 

That Browning had determined to make a re- 
vision in consequence of the wish she expressed, 
the further correspondence between the two re- 
veals. In a letter written to him the following 
month, Miss Barrett speaks of "the new avatar 
of 'Sordello' which you taught me to look for." 
The matter was therefore, clearly in contem- 
plation. But the deity whose avatar she ex- 
pected never became incarnate. While in Paris, 
in the first half of 1856, Browning did indeed 
make an effort to revise the poem. He spent 
much labor and pains, he tells us, to turn the 
work into what the many might like instead of 
what the few must like. But he gave up the at- 
tempt and left it essentially as he found it. Lines 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



were added, changes of expression were made, 
but there was nothing altered in the framework 
and contexture. What the poem needed in order 
to be rendered intelHgible and interesting was 
not occasional revision, but a complete recast; 
and of an undertaking of this kind Browning had 
then become absolutely incapable. 

In dedicating "Sordello" later to his friend 
Melsand, of Dijon, the poet told him that he 
blamed nobody for its failure, least of all himself. 
This last phrase is significant. It reflects his in- 
variable mental attitude. His faults of expres- 
sion, he acknowledged, were many; but people 
might have surmounted the difficulties caused by 
them, had they cared to take the pains; if they 
did not care enough for the book or its writer to 
do this, what would avail its faultlessness ? 
Never was there a more unblushing declaration 
on the part of an author of his willingness to shift 
upon the reader the burden of clearing a path 
through the jungle of his expression which he 
himself was too indolent or too indifferent to 
open up. An attitude of this sort jars heavily 
upon the feelings of the man who regards it as the 
first requirement of a book to be made as read- 
able as possible for those for whose perusal it was 



90 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

designed: and that one of the first requisites 
for this result is that it should not need help out- 
side of itself to be rendered intelligible. Per- 
sonally, too, I confess to getting no particular 
enjoyment from a production which stands in 
need of perpetual commentary. Still tastes are 
different. The existence of many worthy per- 
sons must be conceded who are unable to enjoy 
literary food of any sort until it has gone through 
a preliminary process of mastication by some- 
body else. 

It follows from what has been said that this 
poem is much more a revelation of Browning's 
soul that it is of Sordello's. It is further to be 
added that it fully merited the fate which it has 
been its lot to undergo. In one sense it is inter- 
esting as a study. It has all the worst qualities 
of Browning's style. Rugged versification, ab- 
rupt transition we are prepared to put up with 
in all his pieces. But in this poem, these pe- 
culiarities of diction are carried to the extreme. 
The liberty taken with expression often more 
than approaches lawlessness; it is lawlessness 
itself. As one illustration out of several, phrases 
and sometimes clauses are inserted into sen- 
tences, necessarily breaking the continuity of the 



OF ROBERT BROWNING gi 

thought. Sparingly introduced, these, if brief, 
may be no blemish; sometimes they are a posi- 
tive ornament. But it is an essential condition 
of their value that they should be introduced only 
sparingly. In "Sordello" they not only appear 
often, but sometimes in the most aggravated — 
and to use a modern colloquialism — in the most 
aggravating form. In more than one instance 
the intercalary sentence w^hich occupies the mid- 
dle of another consists of several lines. Neces- 
sarily, the reader fails to carry in his mind, 
amidst this pressure of intrusive matter, w^hat the 
author has been talking about previously. Con- 
sequently, v^hen he arrives at the jumping-off 
place of the remarks inserted, he has to retrace 
his steps and go back to w^here he left off in or- 
der to resume the connection of thought. This 
usage Is bad enough in prose; in poetry it is 
absolutely intolerable. It could never be re- 
sorted to by the conscious literary artist. 

This, hov^ever. Is but a single one of the fatal 
defects which beset expression In "Sordello." 
The poem fails In a number of other and more 
essential things which go to constitute poetry. 
There It stops short. You may apply to It any 
other characterization you choose. You may 



92 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



call it metaphysical, psychological, intellectual, 
problematical, profoundly thoughtful, what in- 
deed you will. But never once does it fulfil the 
function for which poetry exists. It never once 
stirs the heart, it never once uplifts the soul. 
As an aid to mental discipline, as an incitement 
to the efforts of those who have, or fancy they 
have,penetrated its mystery and thereby achieved 
an intellectual victory against great odds, it may 
be regarded as fulfilling a valuable function. 
But by those who believe that the first business of 
a poem is to be poetical, it will never be regarded 
otherwise than as a failure. It will remain a 
colossal derelict upon the sea of literature, in- 
flicting damage upon the strongest intellects that 
graze it even slightly, and hopelessly wrecking 
the frailer mental craft that come into full colli- 
sion with it — at least such is the impression one 
gets from the essays written upon it. 

I have dwelt so long upon this work because 
of the influence it had upon Browning's later 
fortunes. It was something more than failure 
that greeted "Sordello." It imposed a burden 
upon the reputation of the poet against the press- 
ure of which it was impossible for it to bear up. 
The pity of it is that its ill success not merely 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



93 



injured the repute of this particular production, 
but it placed what was soon to show itself an 
almost unsurmountable obstacle in the way o^ 
the beautiful works that were speedily to follow. 
The public mind was thenceforth prejudiced 
against the poet. With the appearance of "Sor- 
dello" began the eclipse of Browning's reputa- 
tion which even after the lapse of more than a 
third of a century had not passed away. Not 
but that he had in the worst of times a band of 
devoted admirers. But the number was small, 
nor were those composing it influential, however 
able. With the general public of even the highly 
educated he thenceforth ceased to be a power. 
This indeed is much more true of England than 
of America. Yet even in this country, where 
familiarity with his writings was altogether 
greater than in his own, his reputation was far 
from proportionate to his merits. In England 
there was further a sort of resentful feeling as to 
the character of his work, as if it evinced a deter- 
mined disposition not to pay any heed to the 
legitimate requirements of the reader. "He is 
further chargeable," wrote the reviewer of "Sor- 
dello" in The Atlas, "with betraying the dis- 
agreeable truth that the author has not only 



94 



ROBERT BROWNING 



benefited nothing from experience, but that the 
sins of his verse are premeditated, wilful, and in- 
curable/* These words assuredly expressed 
the sentiment of large numbers. Included, too, 
among them were many who liked Browning as 
a man, many who had been previously disposed 
to admire him as a poet. "Ephraim is joined 
to his idols, let him alone," represented thence- 
forth the general state of mind. Let alone 
severely he most assuredly was. 



Ill 

"BELLS AND POMEGRANATES" 

" PIPPA PASSES." "A BLOT I' THE 'SCUTCHEON » 

The success of *'SordeIlo" had not been such 
as to encourage the production of further works. 
But Browning himself was not discouraged, 
either at the time or later. He had, as he wrote 
to a friend the following year, "a head full of 
projects — mean to song- write, pi ay- write forth- 
with." Even then three works had been writ- 
ten or were in contemplation. He felt, indeed, 
his mind thronging with ideas to which he must 
give utterance and solicited by schemes which he 
must carry into effect. 

But a publisher could not well be expected to 
furnish at his own expense literature which the 
public was unwilling to buy; and Browning him- 
self could hardly procure the means to under- 
take any great venture at his own risk. At this 

95 



()6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

juncture Moxon made him a proposal. He was 
at that tune bringing out editions of the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists in a cheap form, printing 
their works in fine but clear type, two columns 
to a page. If Browning was willing to publish 
his poems in this manner, the expense would not 
amount to more than twelve to sixteen pounds 
for each volume, issued as a pamphlet. It could 
in consequence be sold for a small sum, and 
readers might naturally be attracted by the low- 
ness of the price. Browning accepted the pro- 
posal. Hence arose the series of volumes which 
appeared under the general title of "Bells and 
Pomegranates." These began in 1841 and 
ended in 1846. They contain some of the best 
work the poet ever produced; assuredly many 
of the pieces by which he is best known to the 
majority of readers. Yet in spite of their cheap- 
ness and excellence these volumes seem to have 
attained nothing like the circulation they de- 
served. I can not find that a second edition of 
any of them ever came out at the time. There 
is an apparent exception in the case of one of the 
tragedies; but it is only apparent. 

The general title given to these works puzzled 
everybody; at least everybody who has left a re- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 97 

corded opinion. In fact, it continued to remain 
a mystery until the concluding number of the 
series. Then Browning, under what may be 
called domestic pressure, condescended to give 
an explanation of it. The reviewer in The 
Athcnaum was perplexed in his notice of the 
first number of the series, and his words are sug- 
gestive of the reputation the poet had now ac- 
quired. "Mr. Browning's conundrums," he 
wrote, "begin with his very title-page. 'Bells 
and Pomegranates' is the general title given 
(it is reasonable to suppose Mr. Browning knows 
why, but certainly we have not yet found out — 
indeed 'we give it up')."' It proved later, in- 
deed, too much for the comprehension of his 
future wife. "Do tell me," she wrote in Octo- 
ber, 1845, "what you mean precisely by your 
*BelI and Pomegranates' title. I have always 
understood it to refer to the Hebraic priestly gar- 
ment — but Mr. Kenyon held against me the 
other day that your reference was different, 
though he had not the remotest idea how. And 
yesterday I forgot to ask, for not the first time. 
Tell me, too, why you should not in the new num- 
ber satisfy by a note somewhere, the Davuses of 

' No. 737, Dec. II, 1841. 



98 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

the world who are in the majority, with a solu- 
tion of this one Sphinx riddle."^ To this re- 
quest Browning acceded, though he thought it 
best to put off the explanation till the closing 
number of the series.^ But before that time 
came, he seems to have changed his mind. He 
was apparently disposed to let the title remain 
in what was to himself its self-evident clearness. 
At least that is the impression received from the 
words of the one person who would not be denied . 
"I persist in thinking," wrote Miss Barrett in 
March, 1846,^ "that you ought not to be too dis- 
dainful to explain your meaning in the * Pome- 
granates.' Surely you might say in a word or 
two, that your title having been doubted about 
(to your surprise, you might say!) you refer the 
doubters to the Jewish priest's robe, and the 
Rabbinical gloss — for I suppose it is a gloss on 
the robe — do you not think so .? Consider that 
Mr. Kenyon and I may fairly represent the aver- 
age intelligence of your readers — and that he was 
altogether in the clouds as to your meaning — 
had not the most distant notion of it — while I, 



' "The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," 
vol. I, p. 248. 

^ Ibid., p. 249. ^ Ibid., p. 570. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 99 

taking hold of the priest's garment, missed the 
Rabbins and the distinctive significance, as com- 
pletely as he did. Now why should you be too 
proud to teach such persons as only desire to be 
taught?" 

Miss Barrett's persistence at last won the day. 
Browning submitted, as she put it, "quite at the 
point of the bayonet." ^ Accordingly, when the 
eighth and final number of the series came out in 
1846, he reluctantly and somewhat grumblingly 
proceeded to paint the lily by explaining still 
further what was in his eyes self-evident. Per- 
haps nothing can be found anywhere more in- 
dicative than were his words on this occasion, 
of his general attitude; of his absolute incapac- 
ity to comprehend that a particular train of as- 
sociation of ideas familiar to him, and therefore 
to him perfectly clear, should not be as clear to 
every one else. "I take the opportunity of ex- 
plaining," he wrote, "in reply to inquiries, that 
I only meant by that title to indicate an endeavor 
toward something like an alternation, or mixt- 
ure of music with discoursing, sound with sense, 
poetry with thought, which looks too ambitious 

' " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," vol. II, 
p. 67. 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred. It 
is Httle to the purpose that such is actually one of 
the most familiar of the many Rabbinical (and 
Patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because I 
confess, that letting authority alone, I supposed 
the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would 
sufficiently convey the desired meaning." 

There you see it. Of course, if you had been 
possessed of any sense, you would have seen it 
before. There is something delightful in the 
naive astonishment expressed that any one should 
have found the slightest perplexity in compre- 
hending at once the meaning which the juxta- 
position of the two main words of the title so 
plainly indicates. It is furthermore so common 
a thing with all lovers of poetry to have a wide 
acquaintance with rabbinical and patristic liter- 
ature that this knowledge ought to have suggested 
the sijrnification to him who had not the sense to 
guess it for himself. Browning's course has been 
defended on the ground that dealing from earliest 
years with out-of-the-way topics, they had be- 
come so familiar to him that he assumed that all 
persons knew them as well as he did himself. 
This is attributing to him much special learning, 
but little sense in the use of it. His acquire- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



merits were certainly great. But there must 
always be a certain feeling of distrust of him 
who seems to know everything about subjects of 
which hardly any one else knows anything. In 
matters, too, where he can be followed with 
comparative ease, he more than once displayed 
misapprehension and ignorance where he as- 
sumed to have perfect knowledge. What con- 
fidence, accordingly, can we always have in the 
value of the treasures he brings back from his 
excursions into the realms of the mysterious 
where few can follow him, and those few rarely 
readers of poetry .? 

So much for the title; now for the works them- 
selves. The first number of the series was "Pippa 
Passes." To "Paracelsus" Browning had re- 
fused to apply the term "drama"; yet by that 
designation he chose to denote this production. 
It is hard to see why he should have given to the 
one the name he had denied to the other. The 
only easily discoverable reason is that the poet 
was now coming to be dominated by the doctrine 
of the unities. He consequently called the later 
work a drama because the scene of it is laid in 
one place, and the time is limited to the daylight 
of one day. But while it is a poem dramatically 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



told, it is in no proper sense of the word what 
he designated it. It consists of a series of ab- 
solutely independent scenes bound together by 
this single slight tie, that upon the action of the 
various personages in them, Pippa, as she passes, 
produces a deep and permanent impression. 

The poem was published in the first half of 
1 841. Both in conception and execution it is one 
of Browning's happiest performances. It is en- 
tirely free from certain defects which are apt to 
characterize his other pieces of a dramatic char- 
acter. There is nowhere in it any violation of 
that natural probability which should govern the 
actions and emotions of the characters. It is an 
old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. We 
all know that it is the unexpected that frequently 
happens, that what in a tale would seem highly 
improbable occurs at times in fact. But to de- 
vices of this kind neither novelist nor playwright 
has a right to resort, unless in very exceptional 
instances. They are precisely of the nature of 
the dcus ex machina to which long ago Horace 
justly objected. Accordingly, if indulged in at 
all, it should be only on very extraordinary oc- 
casions. Writers of these two classes — that is, 
novelists and playwrights — are bound to repre- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 103 



sent men as th^ey appear to us acting under con- 
ditions which are normal. Even when the cir- 
cumstances are exceptiWal, the characters are 
to conduct themselves as we^^hould ekpect to 
find them behaving in real life. To resort not 
to the merely surprising, but to the surprising 
which is also unnatural and improbable, shows 
a deficiency in skill, if not in the highest art. It 
may occasionally be pardoned for the sake of the 
efl^ect it produces, but it can rarely be approved. 
No fault of this sort appears in "Pippa Passes," 
unless one were to consider such what seems to 
me the perfectly legitimate extension to several 
persons of an influence which everybody would 
concede might well have happened to any partic- 
ular individual of them all. We know from our 
own observation, if not from our own experience, 
that a remark overheard, a chance word spoken 
with not the least thought on the part of the 
speaker of affecting the course of another, often 
influences profoundly the whole life of the hearer. 
It is too common to need more than a mere state- 
ment; yet in this work for the first time in litera- 
ture, at least in English literature, has the idea 
been set forth in completeness. Here it is made 
the groundwork upon which the whole action of 



104 I'lIJ^ EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

the piece turns. The girl of the silk mills, igno- 
rant of father, ignorant of mother, appears on this 
one clay of pleasure that diversifies her year of 
toil as the central figure destined to influence the 
future of the four groups of persons whom she 
pictures to herself as the most happy in Asolo — 
rising slowly in her own conception from the rapt- 
ure of guilty love, through the love of bride and 
groom, of mother and son, to the happiness of the 
love which is devoted to the service of the Maker. 
Impersonating all these characters in her fancy, 
she comes upon each of the groups at the critical 
moment, wakening with her song remorse for 
guilt, imparting nobility of resolve, strengthen- 
ing high-hearted but failing resolution, and 
again utterly destroying the force of insidious 
temptation. Unconsciously to herself she has 
been a messenger of heaven to punish the guilty 
and to reward the good. As she passes, she 
leaves behind crime loathing its own foulness, 
evil devices frustrated, misfortune averted, 
schemes that threatened her own fate rendered 
abortive, by inspiring the characters either with 
remorse or with feelings which impart nobility 
to life and bring consolation to the hour of death. 
The scheme of the poem as a whole is worked 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 105 

out with consummate skill. It is both high mo- 
rality and high art. It is free from almost every- 
thing that is objectionable in Browning's man- 
ner, though of course it is not free from his 
mannerisms; for if the mannerisms were lacking, 
the work would hardly have seemed Browning's. 
In it, too, appeared for the first time a specimen 
of that vivid and vigorous prose conversation 
which the poet was to exhibit on a fuller scale in 
"A Soul's Tragedy," the last work of the series. 
In "Pippa Passes" this power is little more than 
indicated; but in the second part of "A Soul's 
Tragedy" it is fully exhibited. It is there so 
genuine, so much more dramatic than his verse 
that one must always regret that Browning did 
not see his way to resort to it more frequently. 
It is especially remarkable for being so distinct 
from his ordinary prose, as regards clearness and 
naturalness and brilliancy. All these it has in 
a profusion which puts the poet on a level with 
the greatest of the Elizabethan playwrights. On 
the contrary, much of his ordinary prose lacks all 
the charm which belongs to his verse and ex- 
hibits nearly all its defects. 

"Pippa Passes" has been from the beginning 
a favorite of readers with whom Browning him- 



lo6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

sell' is ;i r.ivoiiic. lii ilicir cinly coni-spoiulcnce, 
Ixloif lluy li;i(I ;i(lii;illy iml, Ins liKurc wife 
loiilcsscd lo liiin iIkiI sIu: could liiul it in her 
liciui to covii ihc ;iiit!iorshij) o( th;i( |iocin more 
til. Ill ol ;iny oilier of his works.' In Ins reply 
J{rovviniij' (leihiied lliiil lie liiiiis( ll liked il better 
th;m iinylhin;; else lie had evei done.' I here 
W;is every reason indeed to expeil loi it great 
siieeess, at least wilh the most lullivaled elass of 
readers. SoinelliiiiL!, ol (hat siuicss it doiihlless 
(lid adain. Uiil "Sordello" had now aeioin- 
plished Its latal work. I lure is no ohsinniy m 
*' l*ippa Passes" vvln\h should detei' from its lull 
coinj)rcliensioii any reasonahle and reasoning 
creature. I hose |)eeuliaiilies ol expression 
which ill previous works had oil ended so many 
were hen-, l>ut tluy were- few. What manner- 
isms weri- exhihitcd, weii" cxhihited usually in 
a loini to which there lonid he no oh)e(.lion even 
if they did not add atti acti\ iness to exprission. 
luiilhermore, the produition contaiiu-d idias of 
deepest signilicance, couched in poetry of the 
liighest onler. Ihit with tlie exception of I'lit' 

'"Lrllcis of Ivolu-rl Tlri>\viiin|.; ;iu<l I'',li/al)i-tli Itarii-ll," vol. I, 
p. aa. 

» Jhid., p. jH. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 107 

• Examiner the work met a somewhat cool recep- 
tion from the leading critical organs ofithat day. 
This review in TJie Examiner — which is found 
m the number for October 2, 1841 — is notice- 
able, because it is evident from it that Brown- 
ing's faithful partisan, Forster, had been sorely 
tried by the production of "Sordello." It is in- 
teresting to read his words for the effort he made 
to put a good face upon what in his inmost heart 
he felt to be a failure. "'Paracelsus,'" he wrote, 
"announced a new and original poet — one of the 
rarest things met with in these days; much cried 
out for, much sought after, and when found 
much objected to. We dare say 'Paracelsus' 
did not succeed; we never heard of a second edi- 
tion." Then he went on to express himself in 
regard to the huge obstruction which the poet 
had raised in the way of his own fame, and the 
oblivion which in the space of less than two years 
had overtaken the work upon which he had 
staked his hopes of renown, "Mr. Browning," 
he continued, "has published since then; in our 
opinion not so well. But yet not so as to falsify 
any anticipation formed of the character of his 
genius. To write a bad poem is one thing; to 
write a poem on a bad system is another and 



io8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

very clifFcrcnt. When a greater curiosity about 
the writer shall hereafter disentomb 'Sordello/ 
it will not be admired for its faults, but in spite 
of them its power and its beauty will be per- 
ceived." 

Forster warmly praised "Pippa Passes"; but 
his is the only unmixed tribute of admiration 
which can be found in the Icadingweckly dispen- 
sers to the public of ready-made literary judg- 
ments. The poem must have been published 
in April, for The Spectator reviewed it in the 
number which appeared on the seventeenth of 
that month. In that periodical the critic had 
reached the conclusion that the production, so far 
as it had then come out, was the first number of a 
drama, which was called "Bells and Pomegran- 
ates.'* Such was his solution of the problem of 
the title. Accordingly, as this preliminary por- 
tion exhibited only part of a play, allowance must 
be made for it, as it would necessarily be the 
least stirring in its action and the least inter- 
esting in its passion. " PIppa Passes," there- 
fore, it was the sapient conclusion, was not itself 
a drama, but scenes in dialogue without cohe- 
rence and action. It was not devoid of good 
thoughts poetically expressed, was the conde- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



log 



scending admission, but these were perfectly 
ineffective from being in a wrong place. Crude 
as is this comment, its Interest as a specimen of 
critical imbecility yields to the superior density of 
apprehension exhibited by the reviewer in The 
Atlas} Why Pippa kept passing puzzled this 
literary judge sadly. He supposed it must be 
for some sinister purpose to be revealed later. 
Both these critics assumed the poem not to be 
an independent whole, but part of a larger work 
concealed under the general title of " Bells and 
Pomegranates," of the meaning of which they 
frankly acknowledged they had not the most re- 
mote suspicion. 

The Literary Gazette, whose influence, how- 
ever, was now dying out, did not notice the work 
at all; and The AtJienccum delayed its criticism 
till about the end of the year. The reviewer had 
not wasted this long period of preparation. He 
really understood and appreciated the scheme 
of the poem which he justly characterized as re- 
markably beautiful. One gets from his notice, 
indeed, a fairly clear conception of the idea run- 
ning through it. But even in his case the effect 
which had been wrought by "Sordello" was 

' Number for May i, 1841. 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



plainly visible J Ic began his criticism in a 
somewhat truculent way, yet his words are 
worth heeding, not for their truth, but for the ex- 
hibition they afford of the point of view which 
had begun to prevail even among those who had 
at first been disposed to regard the poet favorably. 
"Mr. lirowning," he wrote, "is one of those 
authors, whom, for the sake of an air of original- 
ity and an apparent disposition to tlinik, as a 
motive for writing, we have taken more than 
connnon pains to understand, or than it may 
perhaps turn out that he is worth. Our faith 
in him, however, is not yet extinct — but our pa- 
tience is. More familiarized as we arc, now, 
with his manner — having conquered that rudi- 
ment to the right reading of his productions — 
we yet find his texts nearly as obscure as ever — 
getting, nevertheless, a glimpse, every now and 
then, of meanings which it might have been well 
worth his while to put into I'lnglish." * 

These are the kind of notices which this most 
ex(|uisite of poems received from the leading con- 
icmjioraiy arbiters of public opinion. 1 he es- 
timate taken by the smaller fry of critics may eas- 
ily be guessed. Hut theie had now begun to 

' Numl)cr for Di-ci'iulx-r ii, 1841. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



operate against the reputation of the poet some- 
thing far worse than bitter attack. It was indif- 
ference. He was not censured, lie was simply 
ignored. Not even that most powerful provoca- 
tive to sale, a denunciation of the morality of 
"Pippa Passes," had any perceptible effect in 
increasing its circulation. I'he scene between 
Sebald and Ottima has always made a certain 
class of persons look askance upon the poem. 
At the time of its appearance, it awakened an 
occasional protest. The feelings of some of the 
critics were indeed profoundly outraged. "Nor 
does the moral tone," said the reviewer in The 
Spectator^ "appear to be the kind likely to be 
tolerated on the stage and approved of anywhere. 
In one scene a young wife and her paramour dis- 
cuss their loves, and the murder of the 'old hus- 
band' needlessly, openly, wantonly, tediously, 
and without a touch of compunction, sentiment, 
or true passion." This was the way in which 
appeared to this astute literary guide that tre- 
mendous scene in which sin, suddenly shown its 
own grossness, seeks death as the only expiation 
for guilt. It may be worth while, in consequence, 
to record the prophetic insight of the same gifted 
intellectual luminary who had discovered that 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



"Pippa Passes" was the first part of a play. 
The future story, he told us, was to turn upon 
the endeavor of monsignor, the prelate, to get 
his niece, brought up as a peasant, inveigled to 
Rome as a prostitute, in order that he might get 
possession of her property. Well was he entitled 
to add that the plot was a novelty. 

The recognition which was given at the time 
to **Pippa Passes'* was not essentially different 
from that which came to most of the seven other 
parts which made up the series of " Bells and 
Pomegranates." There was then, as always, a 
small band of devoted admirers. But the gen- 
eral public, even of the highly educated, was, 
and continued to remain, indifferent. In the 
numbers which followed were printed six regular 
plays — all, indeed, that Browning henceforth 
ever wrote. They were entitled " King Victor 
and King Charles," pubHshed early in 1842; 
**The Return of the Druses," published in April, 
1843; "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" acted and 
printed earlier in the same year; "Colombe's 
Birthday," which appeared in the spring of 1844; 
and finally the plays of "Luria" and "A Soul's 
Tragedy," which made up the eighth and last 
number of the series. This came out in the 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



spring of 1846. Only two of these pieces have 
ever been represented on the regular stage. One 
was "Colombe's Birthday" which was acted 
seven times at the Haymarket Theater by Helen 
Faucit, during April and May, 1853, and later 
in the provinces. The other was "A Blot i' 
the 'Scutcheon," the story of which demands de- 
tailed exammation. 

A trustworthy account of the fortunes of this 
play is all the more important because the gross- 
est misstatements about it have become current. 
They have indeed, become so current that there 
is no little danger of their permanent embodi- 
ment in literary history. The pity of it is that 
these misstatements owe their origin largely to 
Browning himself — I need hardly add, with no 
idea on his part of their fictitious nature. The 
production of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" was in 
one respect an event in his life. It led to an 
estrangement between him and Macready. The 
great actor in consequence had no share in the 
performance of this tragedy, though it was 
brought out at his theater. The part he would 
naturally have taken was assumed by Samuel 
Phelps. According to Browning's statement it 
was his own personal dissatisfaction with the re- 



114 T?IE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

luctance shown at first by Macready to appear 
in it which led him to insist upon the actor's 
substitute retaining his place in the play instead 
of yielding it to the manager who had apparently 
repented of his unwillingness. 

This manifest reluctance to bring out the 
play accords little with the assertion now fre- 
quently made that Macready was constantly be- 
seeching the poet to write plays for him to act. 
This on the surface is improbable, after his pre- 
vious experience with "StraflFord." It certainly 
receives no countenance from anything to be 
found in the actor's own diary. Browning's 
conduct on this occasion, as he afterward con- 
fessed, showed ignorance of the proper course to 
be pursued. But as he himself reports the cir- 
cumstances, it evinced something more than ig- 
norance. In the accounts given neither he nor 
any of his admirers seem to be struck by the as- 
surance, to call it by the least offensive name, of 
a dramatic author presuming to dictate to a 
manager, who chanced also to be the leading 
English actor of his time, who should take the 
principal part in a piece brought out at the thea- 
ter under his direction. To Macready himself 
it must have seemed unparalleled impudence. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 115 

But, whatever may be the opinion we hold as to 
the propriety of this action, there can be no dis- 
pute as to its impolicy. To have a new play 
brought out at Macready's theater, without Ma- 
cready in it, was courting failure, no matter 
whether much or little money was spent on the 
accompaniments of its representation. 

We are further to bear in mind in discussing 
this whole story that Macready's side of the dif- 
ferences which arose has never been given. In 
his diary there is little recorded beyond the fact 
that the play appeared. No comment, what- 
ever, is made upon it. It looks as if all reflec- 
tions in regard to it or to the incidents connected 
with its production had been carefully edited out 
of the work as published. On the other hand. 
Browning's side has appeared at least twice in 
what may be called an official form. One of 
these is in the shape of two private letters written 
by him in 1884 to the editor of the London Daily 
News. These were printed in full in Mrs. 
Sutherland Orr's life of the poet. The other is 
the "Personalia" of Mr. Gosse which originally 
came out as a contribution to the Century Maga- 
zine for December, 1881, but was reprinted in 
book form in 1890. This, we are assured, "was 



Ii6 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

inspired and pardy dictated, was revised and ap- 
proved of by (Browning) himself." It was read 
by him as published and received an acknowl- 
edgment implying its correctness. 

These two sources of information may in con- 
sequence be properly looked upon as the author's 
own relation of certain incidents in his career. 
Both are therefore to be treated as of equal valid- 
ity. There are, indeed, between them one or 
two irreconcilable discrepancies in regard to 
particular matters; but in the main the two 
authorities agree. In the "Personalia" Brown- 
ing says that he was wont to be amused at the 
mixture of fact and fable given in what purported 
to be the story of his life. For it he had doubt- 
less ample reason: yet the most ill-informed of 
contemporary biographers never succeeded in 
furnishing a more misleading report of any event 
in his career than he did himself in these two 
authorized accounts of one of his theatrical vent- 
ures. Southcy used to spend a great deal of 
his time in explaining why his various epics had 
never had a sale. The very obvious reason 
seemed never to occur to him that men did not 
care to read them and consequently did not buy 
them. Much after the same fashion Browning 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 117 

in his later years used to explain why his dramas 
had failed upon the stage; or rather he used to 
insist that they had not failed; that it was due 
to purely accidental causes that their career of 
triumph had been prematurely cut short. This 
was especially true of the fortunes of the tragedy 
called "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 

Accordingly let us contrast some of the asser- 
tions about this one play as made by Browning 
himself in the two authorities just mentioned 
with the facts as they really occurred. In con- 
sidering them it is important to keep in mind 
that Macready closed his engagement at the 
Haymarket 1 heater on the 7th of December, 
1 84 1. Before doing so he had agreed to under- 
take the management of Drury Lane. This 
position he assumed and held for two seasons. 
It is evident from both the accounts which come 
from Browning that these two seasons were com- 
pletely confused in his own mind. It is the first of 
which he is thinking; it is of the second he actually 
speaks. All this comes out distinctly the moment 
his assertions are compared with the facts. 

Browing tells us that Macready accepted the 
play of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" while he was 
engaged at the Haymarket and retained it for 



Ii8 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

Drury Lane. It was toward the close of 1841 
— precisely speaking, on the night of December 
27 — that the actor opened his first season at the 
latter theater. If the poet's recollections can be 
trusted, his own play must accordingly have been 
written some time that year before the beginning 
of the first of these two seasons. He further 
tells us that when the season began at the latter 
theater, the manager informed him that he 
should produce his play when he had brought 
out two others — "The Patrician's Daughter" 
and "Plighted Troth." The former was the 
work of Westland Marston, the latter of a brother 
of George Darley. Yet we know from Ma- 
cready's diary that he never even read the drama 
entitled "The Patrician's Daughter" until 
August 29, 1842. He consequently could not 
have told Browning in 1841 that his own play 
must wait for one which the manager had never 
seen, if, indeed, at that time, it had itself an act- 
ual being. 

Browning tells us that after Macready took 
Drury Lane under his management he opened it 
on December 10. The year which he had in 
mind though not specified could have been no 
other than 1842. But in neither of his two sea- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 119 

sons did the manager open the theater on that 
date. As just mentioned, the first began on 
December 27, 1841; as for the second, it began 
October i, 1842. Browning also tells us that 
the season was opened with Marston's "Patri- 
cian's Daughter." But ''The Patrician's Daugh- 
ter" was brought out during his second season, 
not his first. So far, too, was he from beginning 
this second season with it, that there had been 
nearly sixty performances before it came on. 
The date of December lo, 1842, given by him 
for this particular occurrence, is correct; but it 
is about the only correct thing to be found in the 
two accounts for which he is responsible. 

Browning tells us that "The Patrician's 
Daughter" was removed from the stage to make 
way for "Plighted Troth." The last repre- 
sentation of the former play was the 20th of 
January, 1843. But "Plighted Troth" had 
been brought out during Macready's first Drury 
Lane season — precisely speaking, on April 20, 
1842. Then it was most effectually damned. 
Though given out for the following night, it 
seems never to have been heard of again. It 
hardly needs to be said that neither Marston's 
play nor that of any one else could have given 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



way to one which had disappeared from the stage 
fully nine months before. 

Browning tells us that "The Patrician's 
Daughter" had but a moderate success — a suc- 
cess of esteem, it is phrased. Macready wrote 
to him that it had failed in money-getting. Still 
it was acted at least ten times before it was with- 
drawn. Here it is to be said that under Ma- 
cready's management an interval of one or more 
nights — more than one, as a rule — took place be- 
tween successive performances of the same piece. 
Browning further gives us to understand that his 
own play, in spite of the manager's coldness, 
which had caused it to be maimed and mutilated 
and deprived of every advantage, was much more 
than a success of esteem. According to him, it 
was "a complete success" — as Macready him- 
self declared it to be. He tells us that it was an- 
nounced to be played "three times a week until 
further notice," and, moreover, that it "was per- 
formed with entire success to crowded houses 
until the final collapse of Macready's schemes 
brought it abruptly to a close." This, we are 
exultingly assured by his devotees, is the true 
story of a real triumph which erring critics, one 
after another, have chronicled as a defeat. 



OF ROBERT RBOWNING 



To confirm further this view Browning tells 
us that the play had the usual run. The facts 
are that it was brought out on Saturday, Febru- 
ary II, and was further acted on Wednesday 
and Friday of the week following. Then it was 
withdrawn permanently. Accordingly it was 
performed but three nights in all. But not even 
in the eighteenth century, when there were only 
two theaters, was three nights the usual run of a 
successful play. It was a distinct mark of an 
unsuccessful one. If the fortunes of Marston's 
play, which held the stage for ten nights, could 
be termed no more than respectable, what epi- 
thet ought to be applied to those of the one which 
lasted through three performances only .? 

Browning tells us his tragedy gave way to Ma- 
cready's benefit. That benefit took place on 
Friday, February 24, 1843. ^^^ third and 
final performance of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon," 
was on Friday, February 17. There was mani- 
festly no reason on this account for the hurried 
withdrawal from the stage of a successful piece. 
Furthermore, during this interval of a week, four 
plays had been performed. These were "She 
Stoops to Conquer," "Macbeth," "The Lady 
of Lyons," and "As You Like It." 



122 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

Browning tells us that the theater closed a 
fortnight after Macready's benefit. This asser- 
tion would have been absolutely correct if for 
two weeks he had said sixteen. Macready's 
second Drury Lane season closed on the 14th 
of June with the performance of "Macbeth." 
To make the discrepancy of the facts with 
Browning's statement of the facts still more glar- 
ing, it is to be added that during this interval 
of four months the manager had tried his fort- 
unes with two new plays. One of them was 
"The Secretary" of the veteran dramatist, James 
Sheridan Knowles, which was brought out on 
April 28; and the other the "Athelwold" of Mr. 
William Smith, which, printed a year before, 
had been chosen by Miss Faucit for her benefit 
on May 18. Both plays were received with tu- 
multuous applause the first night. Both failed 
to attract audiences. Both were speedily with- 
drawn. Macready all this time was struggling 
with pecuniary difficulties. It is not likely that 
a manager so beset, whatever might be his per- 
sonal feelings, would risk the chances with two 
new and untried plays while a third one, with 
which he could be sure of attracting large audi- 
ences, was suffered to remain unacted. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



123 



Browning tells us that until its withdrawal, 
**A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" was performed to 
crowded houses. Contemporary evidence is so 
far from supporting this assertion that it con- 
tradicts it absolutely. There is a general agree- 
ment among the periodicals of all sorts then ap- 
pearing as to the little favor with which the play 
was received. One quotation may be given 
which practically represents the universal opin- 
ion. This is from the review of the theatrical 
season just ended which can be found in the 
London Times oi June 13, 1843. ''On the nth 
of February," it says, "a three-act play called 
'A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon' made its appear- 
ance and was moderately successful the first 
night while it totally failed in attraction," This 
is essentially the view taken by the other peri- 
odicals, not even excluding The Examiner. 

But a feeling seems to prevail among the mod- 
ern partisans of Browning that anybody who is 
not wholly for him, not merely in the estimate of 
his genius but in the account of the incidents of 
his life, is so much against him that his words can 
not be trusted at all. Accordingly it may be ad- 
visable to cite here the testimony of one who at 
that period belonged to the inner circle of his 



124 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

personal friends. This man is Joel Arnould, 
who subsequently went out to India to take the 
position of Judge of the Supreme Court at Bom- 
bay. He was equally a friend of another one be- 
longing to this same circle, that Alfred Domett 
who was the subject of Browning's poem en- 
titled "Waring." To him residing then in New 
Zealand, Arnould, in an undated letter, but mani- 
festly belonging to 1843, furnished an account of 
the reception this particular play had met. In it 
he followed the accepted Browning view, now 
become traditional, which represents Macready 
as the devil behind the scenes who was mali- 
ciously bent on contriving the ruin of a play which 
thereby would have the effect of contributing fur- 
ther to his own financial ruin. "He did his best 
to wreck it," says one of the poet's biographers.^ 
Arnould gives a description of the first per- 
formance which I select particularly because it 
is far more favorable than that contained in 
any other contemporary record as yet published. 
"The first night," he wrote, "was magnificent. 
There could be no mistake about the honest en- 
thusiasm of the audience. . . . Altogether the 
first night was a triumph. The second night 

* "Robert Browning," by C. H. Herford, New York, 1905, p. 52. 




OF ROBERT BROWNING 125 

was evidently presided over by the spirit of the 
manager. I was one of about sixty or seventy 
in the pit, and yet we seemed crowded when com- 
pared to the desolate emptiness of the boxes. 
The gallery was again full. The third night I 
again took my wife to the boxes. It was evident 
at a glance that it was to be the last. My own 
delight and hers too in the play was increased 
at this third representation and would have gone 
on increasing to a thirtieth; but the miserable 
great chilly house with its apathy and emptiness 
produced in us both the painful sensation which 
made her exclaim that she * could cry with vexa- 
tion at seeing so noble a play so basely marred.'"^ 
Yet this enthusiastic friend who could have kept 
on going to the same performance thirty times 
pointed out that a new play produced at Ma- 
cready's theater, with the foremost English actor 
taking no part in it, was foredoomed to failure. 
That one fact would suffice to repel numbers. 
Arnould further conceded that even had Ma- 
cready taken part, the piece could never have be- 
come permanently popular. 

I have brought here into sharp contrast Brown- 
ing's statement of facts about the production of 

* "Robert Browning and Alfred Doniett," p. 66. 



126 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

"A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" with the facts as they 
actually are. Further minor conflicts with the 
eternal verities; further minor discrepancies be- 
tween the two accounts for which he is respon- 
sible, lack of time and space compels me to 
disregard. In one of the two authorities here fol- 
lowed he is represented as asserting that he had 
kept silence for forty years while the stories of the 
failure of his play were in circulation. It would 
have been far better had he kept silence the rest 
of his life. From the intentional false witness 
of the wicked truth can be protected. How can 
we shield it from the unintentional false witness 
of the good .? It is hardly possible to secure bet- 
ter evidence than that which came from Brown- 
ing to establish the truth of what is demonstrably 
false. For he himself was simply incapable of 
making a statement which he knew to be un- 
trustworthy, and especially one that would re- 
dound unjustly to his own credit. Yet we have 
had here to deal with a tissue of assertions of his, 
all honestly made and all having no foundation in 
fact. Yet because they have come from a man 
of highest character as well as of genius, his par- 
tisans have exhibited their loyalty at the expense 
of their judgment in accepting his contradictions 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 127 

of previously accepted beliefs not only without 
question, but without the slightest attempt at 
verification. It has, indeed, been more than 
once exultingly proclaimed that these inaccurate 
assertions furnish proof positive that the com- 
mon accounts of the ill success of his plays, once 
current, have received their death-blow and that 
all inferences derived from their assumed failure 
must be henceforth treated as erroneous and 
misleading. 

No one, in truth, who has had occasion to refer 
to the history of this particular play, seems ca- 
pable of making an accurate statement about it. 
From author down to auditor they tell us the 
most easily exposed untruths with a full convic- 
tion of their perfect conformity to fact. Let us 
take two striking illustrations of this condition of 
things. Mrs. Bridell-Fox, the daughter of the 
early friend and patron of Browning, gave in The 
Argosy of February, 1890, an account of the 
first performance of "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 
She gave it, to use her own words, as she vividly 
recalled it. " In the play," she wrote, " Macready 
took the part of Lord Thorold, the elder brother, 
on the first night of its representation only. I 
well remember his noble bearing and dignified 



128 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

grace. It was, however, produced by him in the 
later days of his management of Drury Lane, 
when worn out with fatigue and anxiety, he was 
unable to sustain the part, and handed it over 
to Mr. Phelps for the remainder of the nights the 
play ran." Here is a woman of unquestionable 
integrity and truthfulness recalling vividly the 
sight of something which she had never seen at 
the time specified nor at any time whatever; for 
Macready never in his life took the part of 
Thorold Lord Tresham. 

Let us turn to another creation of the imagina- 
tion, though in this instance based upon a foun- 
dation of fact. In 1844 Phelps, who was the 
original Lord Tresham, took upon himself the 
management of the Sadler's Wells Theater in 
Islington. There he made a great success, and 
there he remained nearly a score of years. In 
the fifth year of his management — specifically in 
November, 1848 — he revived "A Blot i' the 
'Scutcheon." His nephew and biographer gave 
to the Browning Society, in 1888, a glowing ac- 
count of the favor it met at its reproduction. " It 
was played," he wrote, "four nights for an en- 
tire month (the run he usually gave a play pro- 
duced by him at this period) to large and en- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 129 



thusiastic audiences, as I can testify, having been 
at the theatre the greatest part of each evening." * 
This, if true, would make at least sixteen per- 
formances during the period immediately fol- 
lowing the revival. Yet records which can not 
be disputed show that it did not run for a 
month, but for two weeks only; and that during 
these two weeks it was acted not four times a 
week but three. Later in February, 1849, it was 
acted twice. This made eight performances in 
all during the whole season.' Here accordingly 
is testimony given in fullest sincerity by a man 
present who was in a position peculiarly favora- 
ble for ascertaining precisely what had occurred. 
Yet to the truth of what actually occurred, his 
statements have only a remote relation. If 
we can not trust his testimony as to the easily 
verified number of performances given, what 
confidence can we have in his testimony as to 
the largeness and enthusiasm of the audience 
assembled ? The further fact that Phelps did 
not during his long management produce again 

• Letter of W. May Phelps, dated March 3, 1888. Proceedings 
of Browning Society, Notes No. 147, p. 243. 

= The play was acted at the Sadler's Wells Theater, Nov. 27, 
28, and 29; and Dec. 7, 8, 9, in 1848; and on February 2 and 3, 



I30 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

the piece, in which at its first representation at 
Drury Lane he was generally regarded as having 
achieved distinct success, seems to indicate that 
he did not share in his nephew's view as to the 
number and zeal of those who were present at 
this revival. 

There is indeed no question that the play, 
so far from being the complete success which 
Browning termed it, was a failure. Such was the 
view taken of its fortunes in all contemporary 
notices, whether friendly or hostile. In The 
Examiner Forster justly praised the tragedy as a 
work of rare beauty and as unutterably tender 
and passionate. Still he did not venture to pre- 
dict for it anything but a short existence on the 
stage. That it succeeded fairly well the first 
night may be freely admitted. But the same 
thing is to be said of many pieces that then failed 
— in particular of the very two already mentioned 
which followed it the same season at the same 
theater. If contemporary evidence can be trust- 
ed, each of these was received the first night 
with more enthusiasm than was Browning's 
play. Yet each failed to attract audiences, each 
was speedily withdrawn. Their fate was the 
very one which befell "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon." 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



131 



At its original performance there was present a 
strong body of admirers, brought thither by per- 
sonal regard for the author or impressed by the 
power and passion displayed in the poetry. But 
there was also a distinct minority of dissen- 
tients. We know that even on this first repre- 
sentation hisses were heard. "The author," 
says the report in The Times, "was called for at 
the conclusion, but there was quite enough of 
disapprobation expressed to account for his un- 
willingness to appear." 

Up to this point the success of the play has 
been considered. Enough has been said to 
show that at its original representation "A Blot 
i' the 'Scutcheon" was a failure. The further 
question now arises, Ought it to have been a 
success } It must be kept in mind that we are 
not here discussing the work as a contribution 
to literature, but as an attempt at the dramatic 
representation of real life. We can concede 
willingly the fervor and fire and passion which 
characterize it in numerous places and drew 
from Dickens his enthusiastic tribute. We can 
further concede the opportunities which it af- 
fords and improves for affecting and tragic 
situations. But we are treating it here simply 



132 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

as a work of art, as an exemplification of that 
drama, the aim of which, as its greatest exponent 
has told us, is to hold the mirror up to nature. 
This involves as a fundamental consideration 
the representation of life as it is, and of the men 
living it conducting themselves in the way we 
have reason and right to expect. The story 
taken as the groundwork of the drama may be 
as unreal and impossible as one found in the 
Arabian Nights, But that once accepted, what 
is required is that the personages should act as 
they would were it probable and true. But in 
no work produced by any great poet have these 
principles been more systematically violated, or 
rather defied, than in the play under discussion. 
The characters are influenced by motives no one 
could deem natural. They perform acts no one 
in his senses would look upon as rational. 

To begin at the beginning, the plot itself of this 
play, dealing, as it does, with modern feelings 
and conventions, is something more than in- 
credible. It outrages all conceptions of the prob- 
able, not to say the possible. Events that are 
represented as occurring have undoubtedly oc- 
curred and perhaps often; but they have never 
occurred under the conditions here given. There 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



^33 



is absolute incongruity between the characters 
of the persons portrayed and their acts. This 
comes out clearly the moment we detach our- 
selves from the play considered as literature, and 
contemplate it as a picture of human life. Take 
the very initial conception. Mildred, Lord Tres- 
ham's sister, a young and beautiful girl, has been 
concerned in a criminal intrigue with the young 
earl of Merton. They are intending to condone 
their guilt by marriage. At the veiy outset we 
have two persons depicted as possessed of the 
loftiest character and animated by the noblest 
feelings, furthermore desperately in love with 
each other, acting in a way that could never have 
happened in real life, had they been such as they 
are represented to be. There has been and there 
is nothing to prevent their union. They both 
belong to the same station in life. No differ- 
ences exist between their families. There is 
no disparity of age. The alliance is not only a 
natural one, but suitable from every other point 
of view besides that of mutual love. There is 
no reason why the hero should not from the out- 
set have wooed the heroine in the way of honor- 
able marriage as he is represented as doing at the 
time the play opens. 



134 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



Accordingly it may be fairly asked, why should 
the two have engaged in an intrigue of this sort ? 
Why, before being concerned in it, has not this 
lofty-minded lover applied for the hand of the 
woman he cherished ? In real life this would 
have been the inevitable course to follow. In the 
drama only one reason is given for his failure to 
take it. In his dying moments the earl tells the 
man who has slain him that it was fear of him, 
and of his surpassing reputation, of him the all- 
courted, the all-accomplished scholar and gentle- 
man, that has deterred him from presuming to 
venture upon the daring step of asking for the 
hand of the woman he loved. Unfortunately this 
fear had not extended to another member of 
the family where it would have been much more 
in place. The timidity which trembled before 
man's austerity stood in no awe of woman's 
purity. What had kept him from seeking from 
the brother that which could have been had for 
the asking did not prevent him from engaging 
and succeeding in the effort to overcome the vir- 
tue of the sister. 

Let us now turn to the other party in the 
affair. She is portrayed as an embodiment of 
purity. Such at least she is in the eyes of her 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 135 

lover and of her nearest of kin. She is filled 
with most agonizing remorse for her guilt. Yet 
no more than her suitor could she have been ig- 
norant of the fact that there v^ere no insurmount- 
able obstacles in the v^ay of their union. Cer- 
tainly the experiment of asking for her hand 
might have seemed to her well worth trying be- 
fore sacrificing her honor. A woman perfectly 
pure at heart can indeed be made the victim of 
overpowering passion. But she would never be 
likely to cast aside maidenly reserve and virginal 
modesty on a slight pretext — least of all, on one 
so attenuated as this, that her lover felt a certain 
timidity about making an application for her 
hand in regular form. 

Had the situation been different; had there 
existed between the two a passionate love to 
which circumstances had opposed an impregna- 
ble barrier; had there been between the families 
a hostility so bitter that the obstacles raised by 
mutual enmity were or appeared unsurmount- 
able; had their positions in life been so different 
that a proposition of marriage on the part of the 
suitor would have seemed to her natural guard- 
ians to partake of the nature of unwarrantable 
presumption if not of actual insult: in such cir- 



136 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

cumstances there would have been palliation for 
the conductor the two in the eyes of the austerest, 
even though they refused to grant pardon. But 
not a single one of these mitigating details ex- 
isted. The only defence the heroine makes for 
herself is conveyed in the simple phrase, **I had 
no mother." This, as it appears in the acting, 
is effective and tragic. But the point to be in- 
sisted upon in looking at this play as the work of 
a great dramatic exponent of human nature, and 
not merely as the work of a great poet, is that had 
the heroine been really of the character ascribed 
to her, she would not here have needed a mother. 
So far from yielding to the solicitations of her 
lover under the conditions represented as exist- 
ing, it would have required nothing more than 
ordinary womanly reserve and purity to repel any 
proposition of the sort with something more than 
indignation. To take any other view is an insult 
to womanhood. 

No argument can explain away this violation 
of the truth of life, no sophistry can reconcile the 
action of these two principal personages of the 
drama with the characters ascribed to them. 
Had the suitor been the sort of man he is repre- 
sented to be, he would never have taken advan- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 137 

tage of the innocence and ignorance of a loving 
and trustful girl. Had in turn the heroine been 
the sort of woman she is represented to be, the 
temptation proffered would have been no temp- 
tation at all. Accordingly their previous con- 
duct, as depicted by Browning himself, does not 
give the impression of persons hurried into the 
commission of sin by the stress of circumstances 
but rather of a wanton falling into it from the 
lack of principle. At the very outset therefore 
we are confronted by the fact that the whole ac- 
tion of the play hinges upon a situation for the 
existence of which there is no adequate reason. 
As if this were not enough, the behavior of the 
various personages of the drama is equally with- 
out reason. There is indeed a close consistency 
between the unreality of the plot and the fatuity 
of those who are employed to carry it on. The 
characters act throughout with a defiance of 
ordinary sense that it is almost impossible to 
conceive manifested by rational beings in real 
hfe. 

Let us take one of the early incidents of the 
play. The lover has overcome his dread of Mil- 
dred's brother sufficiently to venture to apply for 
her hand in due form. He has been graciously. 



138 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

even warmly, received. His addresses have been 
sanctioned by the head of the house. Nothing 
more is needed save formal acceptance of them 
by the woman who has yielded herself to him 
already. Both therefore are now fully assured 
that it is in their power to atone, so far as in 
them Hes, for the past; that henceforth the earl 
can visit Mildred as her accepted and ac- 
knowledged lover. Only two days must pass — 
one day is all that is really necessary — and he 
can then claim openly, as his promised bride, 
the woman he loves. Certainly it would seem 
that during this brief interval they might refrain 
for the sake of their common future from doing 
the slightest act that would tend to bring about 
the revelation of their secret. The meeting in 
her chamber must always have been hazardous — 
so hazardous that its having remained so long 
undiscovered is one of the inherent improbabili- 
ties of the play which is lost to consideration in 
the view of the many greater improbabilities 
which abound in it. But now that perfect safety 
is in sight, there is surely no need of running fur- 
ther risk, no justification for it. 

In real life, refraining from such further risk 
would unquestionably have been the course 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



139 



adopted. In the play the thought of so common- 
sense a procedure seems never to have occurred 
to either of the lovers. The earl takes the occa- 
sion of the night succeeding the day of his ac- 
ceptance by Mildred's brother to visit Mildred 
herself in her ow^n chamber. As secrecy was all 
important, he would, in real life, have made his 
way to his destined haven in the profoundest 
silence. Instead he comes singing a song. The 
stage direction tell us that it is to be sung in as 
low a voice as possible. But however repressed 
in the delivery, if it reached the ears of the one to 
whom it was addressed, it was necessarily liable 
to reach the ears of others. Therefore, in real 
life it would never have been sung at all. It was 
poetry that demanded its utterance, not dra- 
matic propriety. For it is a beautiful lyric. 
Too much can not be said in praise of its pas- 
sionate intensity. Only it is not appropriate to 
the occasion. In the drama which sets out to 
represent life as it is, this was the time above all 
to avoid singing it. 

Furthermore, the song, while not appropriate 
to the occasion, can not be regarded as altogether 
appropriate to the characters. It must have 
grated upon the feelings of some of the audience 



I40 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

— as a matter of fact we know that on the first 
night it did — to have the lover about to make a 
secret midnight visit to the chamber of the hero- 
ine salute her with its opening line, 

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the 
purest." 

Pure at heart she may be conceded to be in spite 
of all that has happened. It would have been 
right for her lover to have so assured her in the 
privacy of the interview. But the song is as 
much addressed to the audience as it is to her it 
celebrates. Accordingly the view expressed in 
it could hardly have been deemed a compliment 
to the character of the women present. They 
might justifiably resent having it chanted to 
them almost defiantly that the girl who is repre- 
sented as having been concerned in an illicit in- 
trigue is actually purer than the purest to be 
found among them. It is no wonder that on 
the first night of its performance the play came 
near being wrecked on this particular scene. In 
spite of the fervor and beauty of the lyric there 
was manifested among the irreverent scattered 
through the audience a perceptible disposition to 
scoff. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 141 

But the untruthfulness of the play as a repre- 
sentation of real life does not stop at this point. 
To Lord Tresham is revealed the terrible fact 
that night after night Mildred has been visited in 
her chamber by an unknown man. She is re- 
proached for her course by her agonized brother. 
She makes no attempt to deny her guilt, but 
absolutely refuses to disclose the name of her 
accomplice. At the same time she expresses her 
willingness to receive the Earl as her affianced 
bridegroom. Naturally her brother is horrified 
at the apparent intention to inflict an atrocious 
wrong upon an unsuspecting suitor, to commit 
an act which would bring dishonor upon him 
who suffered it and dishonor of a graver kind 
upon those who had carried it into execution. 
One can understand Mildred's refusal to reveal 
her lover's name, if she had made up her mind 
to expiate her sin by leading henceforth a life 
of solitary contrition. But this she has not the 
slightest thought of doing. So long therefore as 
she purposes to persist in her determination to 
marry the man who has offered himself, why not 
reveal the actual facts of the situation .f* Why 
not make it known that the applicant for her 
hand and the nightly visitor to herchamber are 



142 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

one and the same person ? It is not merely the 
natural course for her to pursue, in the circum- 
stances it is the only one; and she resolutely re- 
fuses to pursue it. 

Several defences have been pleaded for her un- 
willingness to make a revelation which is morally 
obligatory if she intends to enter into the pur- 
posed union. They have been put forth from 
the point of view of high art, and again from 
a profound philosophic view of human nature. 
The moment any one of these is scrutinized, it is 
felt to be an effort, futile as it is labored, to ex- 
plain the unexplainable. But looked at from 
the author's point of view there is no difficulty in 
accounting for her silence. Had she revealed 
the name of her lover, the play would have had 
to come at once to an untimely end, or would 
have had to be furnished with an entirely dif- 
ferent denouement. The grossest improbabili- 
ties were therefore to be accepted to prevent the 
otherwise inevitable result. 

Take again the . next night. Mildred now 
knows that her secret has been discovered. She 
knows in consequence that any attempt to renew 
the visit to her chamber will be watched and will 
be watched by hostile eyes. She not only rec- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 143 

ognizes the danger, the author makes us aware 
that she recognizes it. When Guendolen, who 
has surprised her secret, mentions the renewed 
coming of her lover as possible, she exclaims, 
"he is lost." To prevent this calamity she 
could certainly have refrained from any act 
which would have the effect of luring him on to 
the destruction which in that event she foresees 
to be certain. In real life not to give the signal 
for his coming would have been the least thing 
she could do in order to avert the threatened 
peril. But in the drama an expedient so simple 
as this seems not to have occurred to her or to 
her adviser. So at midnight Mildred proceeds 
to transfer the lamp from the red square in the 
pointed glass higher up to the small dark blue 
pane. This is the appointed signal for her lover 
to come. He obeys and the result follows which 
any one above the capacity of an idiot would 
have foreseen must follow. 

Nor do the other personages of the drama dis- 
play the qualities which are supposed to charac- 
terize rational human beings. Guendolen, for 
instance, is represented as possessing fully a 
soundness of judgment which is mainly con- 
spicuous by its absence in the acts of the rest. 



144 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

She discovers by her own intuitive sagacity that 
Mildred's midnight visitor and her suitor are 
one and the same person. She knows that the 
brother has gone off in an agony o^ desperation 
and is lost to direct communication. Still she 
has her own lover, Austin, at command. To a 
certain extent therefore she is mistress of the 
situation. But she makes not the slightest effort 
to utilize the advantage of her position. Now 
that the truth is known, it is all-important that 
the earl should not repeat his absurd conduct of 
the night before in visiting Mildred's chamber. 
What does she do to prevent this visit ? What 
effort does she put forth to warn the lover of what 
she must have recognized as his deadly peril ? 
None at all. She takes no steps to hinder Mil- 
dred from setting the signal, she takes no steps 
to inform the earl of the risk he runs in obeying 
it. Her lack of resource has its counterpart in 
the conduct of the head of the house in forcing 
on the duel after he has learned that his sister's 
suitor is the real midnight visitor. Though his 
behavior is more explicable, it is not flattering 
to his sense. He further contributes an addi- 
tional luster to his scutcheon by slaying a man 
who makes, as he recognizes himself, no real 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 145 

attempt at defence. This is the final irrational 
act of a series of irrational acts in which each 
character has to conduct himself as unnaturally 
as possible to prevent the play from ending 
naturally. 

All this violation of the truth of life was 
apparent to most men at the time, though it 
occasionally escaped the attention of some of 
the most keen-sighted. The necessities of the 
drama at times exact, or at any rate permit, the 
neglect of probability in the conduct of the char- 
acters. Still they do not require unhesitating 
and persistent defiance of it. Yet such is the 
course unflinchingly followed in this play. The 
possibility of the existence of the condition of 
things described in it at its opening puts of itself 
a suflSciently severe strain upon belief, or rather 
upon credulity, without the further persistent 
demands made upon it during the course of the 
action. As a matter of fact, we are in a world of 
unreal beings, powerfully portrayed, it is true; for 
the situations are often exciting, and the pathos 
of the piece is undeniable to him who can keep 
out of his mind the preposterous conduct of the 
characters. But the action all through lies out 
of the realm of probability, not to say possibility. 



146 ROBERT BROWNING 

It is therefore out of the realm of the highest art. 
So Httle is there of that in it that the tragedy con- 
sists largely of a series of narrow escapes from 
arriving at a happy termination, and thereby be- 
coming a comedy. From this fate nothing could 
have saved it, if a single one of the leading 
characters had chosen to act as he or she would 
have acted in real life. Those who dwell in the 
rarefied air of the emotional, or rather the hys- 
terical, may find the behavior of the personages 
of the play worthy of approbation. Assuredly 
cold-blooded, hard-headed, and hard-hearted 
men of the world will feel that people who display 
so little sense ought to die, for they are not fit 
to live in any society made up of rational or even 
semirational beings. 



IV 
"BELLS AND POMEGRANATES" 

"A SOUL'S TRAGEDY"— "LYRICS"— DECLINE AND 
REVIVAL OF BROWNING'S REPUTATION 

Whatever may be the theoretical estimate 
privately entertained of the value of Browning's 
plays in themselves, the facts given in the previ- 
ous lectures prove beyond dispute that as con- 
tributions to the acting drama the verdict of the 
public has never been in their favor. Not one 
of them has ever attained genuine success on the 
stage. You may, if you please, attribute this 
inferiority in drawing power to the superiority 
these pieces display as literature; though, it must 
be confessed that this is something of a reflection 
upon the continuous attraction for theater-goers 
which Shakespeare, adequately and even inad- 
equately interpreted, has exerted for more than 
three centuries. Yet, even as literature most of 
Browning's plays do not occupy a high rank. 
Some of them are tender and delicate as is "Co- 
147 



148 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

lombe's Birthday"; some of them are tedious as 
is "Strafford." One of them — "The Return of 
the Druses" — has the excitement of a starthng 
denouement. But as a rule they interest the 
reader as Httle in the closet as those did the hearer 
which were acted upon the stage. 

To this general criticism there is one excep- 
tion. I refer to "A Soul's Tragedy," which with 
*' Luria" made up the eighth and last number of 
the series of " Bells and Pomegranates." This 
is a drama which the poet had written two or 
three years before publication, apparently at 
a heat. Browning rivalled and even occas- 
sionally surpassed his most thorough-going parti- 
sans in the tendency he exhibited to prefer his 
poorest work to his best. For this particular 
play he naturally therefore had no great regard — 
an opinion which need not weigh heavily upon us, 
coming as it does from one who never ceased to 
think highly of " Sordello." Before showing the 
manuscript of it to his future wife, he described 
it to her as all sneering and disillusion. He was 
reluctant to print it; indeed, he was perfectly 
ready to destroy it and assured her in the fullest 
sincerity that if she said the word, it should be 
burned. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 149 

In truth, it gives one a most puzzling idea of 
Browning's mental processes to find that he 
thought this drama, which is conspicuous among 
his works for its clearness, was so obscure — so 
much more obscure than " Luria," for instance — 
that he declared that if the latter was dearishy 
the printing of the former would be an unneces- 
sary troubling of the waters. He re-read it in 
February, 1846. His previous impressions about 
it were then fully confirmed. In consequence, 
he hesitated about including it in the series 
of "Bells and Pomegranates." Though there 
were several points in it which struck him as suc- 
cessful in design and execution, he came to the 
conclusion that it would be preferable to post- 
pone its publication. Subject-matter and style, 
he thought, were alike unpopular. This was 
true, he said, even "for the literary grex that 
stands aloof from the purer plehs, and uses that 
privilege to display and parade an ignorance 
which the other is altogether unconscious of."* 
He was therefore disposed to reserve from publi- 
cation, for the time being, this unlucky play, as 
he called it. In the case of a possible second 

* "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 470. 



I50 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

edition of the series it could then be quietly in- 
serted in its proper place. 

Great therefore was Miss Barrett's astonish- 
ment when the work was submitted to her for 
perusal. She was almost disposed to be indig- 
nant with its author for misleading her, " Now," 
she wrote, "I shall know what to believe when 
you talk of very bad and indifferent doings of 
yours." ^ She recognized at once the great ex- 
cellence of the play. The correspondence be- 
tween the two makes it clear that at heart she 
preferred it to " Luria," though she felt bound to 
defer sufficiently to her lover's judgment to accord 
to the latter a nominal superiority. But even so 
much concession as this was wrung from her, 
rather than cheerfully granted. **It is a work," 
she wrote, '*full of power and significance, and 
I am not at all sure (not that it is wise to make 
comparisons, but that I want you to understand 
how I am impressed!) — I am not at all sure that 
if I knew you now first and only by these two 
productions — 'Luria' and 'The Tragedy' — I 
should not involuntarily attribute more power 
and a higher faculty to the writer of the last." ^ 

'"Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 540. 
^ Ibid., vol.11, p. 13. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 151 

In the conflict that went on between the duty 
of heeding her own judgment and the desire that 
urged her to defer to the taste of her lover, she 
felt compelled to qualify this admission. "Yet 
'Luria' is the completer work — I know it very 
well," she added. Under the circumstances, it 
would be unjust to reckon up against her this in- 
dulgence in a mild form of mendacity. 

The more familiar Miss Barrett became with 
the play, the more she was impressed with its 
vividness and vitality. She could at first hardly 
forgive Browning for terrifying her about its 
poorness and its obscurity. "The worst thing 
is," she WTOte, "that I half believed you, and 
took the manuscript to be something inferior — 
for you — and the advisableness of its publica- 
tion a doubtful case." ^ Later she gave renewed 
expression to her opinion. " It delights me," she 
wrote, "and must raise your reputation as a 
poet and thinker — must." ^ Browning himself 
was perfectly sincere in his depreciatory estimate 
of the work. He was equally sincere in the sur- 
prise he expressed at the liking she manifested 
for it. Fortunately this liking compelled its pub- 
lication at the time. Unfortunately it was not 

> " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 541. ^ Ibid., vol. II, p. 34. 



152 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

permitted to precede "Luria" in the number 
in which it was printed, and suffered then and 
perhaps has always suffered since from the in- 
fluence of that somewhat depressing forerunner. 
As it further presents no difficulties of compre- 
hension or construction, as it is a faithful por- 
trayal of human nature, the poor opinion which 
Browning entertained of it has extended to many 
of his devotees, some of whom seem hardly 
aware of its existence. 

"A Soul's Tragedy" deserves fully the praise 
which Miss Barrett gave it. Of all the dramatic 
writings of Browning, it is the one that unites 
consistency of plot with clearness of expression 
and a course of action that follows a line of nat- 
ural development and is, therefore, in full accord- 
ance with the truth of life. The characters in it 
are characters we can all understand and appre- 
ciate. They are acted upon by influences we all 
recognize as potent, they are swept along by im- 
pulses which are daily affecting the lives of those 
about us. The general deterioration in conduct 
and motive of the hero, which constitutes the 
tragedy of the play, is the inevitable outcome to 
be expected of a character which had raised be- 
fore itself an ideal up to which it was not fitted 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 153 

to live; and its lofty pretension contrasted with 
its pitiful performance hardly needs to be accent- 
uated by the cynical words of the papal legate, 
cool, sarcastic, piercing at a glance the shallow 
nature which strove to persuade itself that it was 
animated by high purposes. From the very out- 
set of his appearance he intimates the inevitable 
failure and dishonor which are to wait upon the 
man who assumes the attitude of a lover of his 
country, while all the time he is eaten up with 
love of himself. 

Before taking leave of the plays, it may be well 
to note that Browning, in no respect a follower 
of any school, in many respects a law unto him- 
self, in his method of expression almost defiantly 
free from the trammels of the conventional — that 
Browning of all men should have been the only 
great writer of our day, at all events of our race, 
to deliver himself of his own accord into the 
bondage of the unities, and if not to accept fully 
that antiquated superstition, to be profoundly 
affected by it. He did not observe it indeed in 
his first play; he sometimes strained its require- 
ments in his later ones; but in his secret soul he 
had a distinct hankering after it. It was some- 
times impossible to carry through the action of 



154 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

his drama within the Hmits required by this doc- 
trine. Accordingly, he divided into two parts 
— as in "King Victor and King Charles" and 
in "A Soul's Tragedy" — what is really one 
play. So an artificial unity is gained at the 
expense of a natural one; for in each of these 
parts the action is limited to a single day. But 
this is really a concession to an outworn creed 
rather than the observance of any principle of 
art — for the plays as they are, are organic wholes, 
and neither part has any justification for its own 
existence without the existence of the other. In 
the case of "The Return of the Druses," " Co- 
lombe's Birthday," and " Luria " the action in 
each instance is limited to one day and one place. 
In "A Blot i' the 'Scutcheon" the stress of cir- 
cumstances compels the extension of the time 
somewhat beyond the prescribed twenty-four 
hours. In general, the difficulties in which he 
involves himself by encumbering his motions 
with these fetters have been successfully sur- 
mounted; though in certain of them, and espec- 
ially so in "Luria," there is always present to the 
mind the perpetually recurring flaw in the ob- 
servance of the unities, the moral impossibility 
of the events taking place in the limited time in 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 155 

which they are described as happening, and too 
often the physical impossibihty. Why Browning 
should have voluntarily entered into a bondage 
which France had then flung off", it is not easy 
to say. 

So much for the plays. But in the series of 
*' Bells and Pomegranates" were two parts 
which have done more to make Browning's 
name a household word than perhaps nearly all 
his other poetry combined — at least, not more 
than one exception can be found in his later pro- 
duction. These two were the sixteen pages of 
"Dramatic Lyrics "which made up No. Ill, and 
the twenty-four pages of " Dramatic Romances 
and Lyrics " which made up No.VIL The former 
contained some of the best-known minor poems. 
These gave at the time to those who were begin- 
ning to lose faith in him a renewed assurance that 
his poetic power was of the highest quality, and 
needed only right direction to place him in the 
very front rank of authors then living. Forster's 
review in The Examiner of the first of these two 
numbers is so clear a proof of the harm which 
had been wrought to his reputation by the work 
upon which he had prided himself, that a few 
sentences of it are worth quoting. "If poetry," 



156 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

he wrote, "were exactly the thing to grind pro- 
fessors of metaphysics on, we should pray to Mr. 
Browning for perpetual 'Sordellos.' As it is, we 
are humble enough and modest enough to be 
more thankful for * Dramatic Lyrics.' The col- 
lection before us is welcome for its own sake, and 
more welcome for the indication of the poet's 
advance in a right direction. Some of this we 
saw and thanked him for in his ' Victor and 
Charles,' much more in his delightful 'Pippa 
Passes,' and in the simple and manly strain of 
some of these 'Dramatic Lyrics' we find proof of 
the firmer march and steadier control. We were 
the first to hail his noble start in 'Paracelsus'; 
the 'Strafford' and 'Sordello' did not shake 
our faith in him; and we shall see him reach the 
goal." ' 

In this collection appeared that favorite poem 
for children as well as for persons of riper growth, 
"The Pied Piper of Hamelin." It had been 
written in May, 1842, for Macready's child. It 
is manifest that Brownino; himself either did 
not think much of it, or that he believed that it 
was not likely to increase his reputation. It was 
added at the last moment only because there were 

* Examiner, Nov. 26, 1843. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 157 

some columns that had to be filled up for this 
particular number. It is under the circum- 
stances a singular coincidence that "Lady Gerald- 
ine's Courtship," one of the most popular pieces 
by his future wife, was written at a heat to meet 
corresponding and similar unpoetical conditions. 
This same part also included several of his con- 
trasted pieces of which the two entitled ''Camp" 
and "Cloister" are perhaps the most familiar to 
readers. Here likewise appeared some perpet- 
ual favorites as "In a Gondola," "Waring," 
and "Through the Metidja to Abdel Kader." 
Indeed, there was hardly a piece in it not 
worth reading and remembering. 

But fine as was this collection, it was even 
surpassed by the seventh number of the series, 
which bore as its title "Dramatic Romances and 
Lyrics." There are very few individual books 
of any author in our tongue which contain so 
many pieces of such sustained excellence. By 
Browning himself it was never surpassed as a 
whole. Outside certainly of the later collection 
entitled "Men and Women," no volume of his 
ever appealed to so wide a circle of readers of 
different tastes and temperaments. Six of the 
poems appearing in it had been published previ- 



158 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

ously. Browning for some reason was always 
averse to bringing out his work in periodicals. 
Gratitude to Fox had induced him to contribute 
some of his early pieces to the Monthly Reposi- 
tory. He was now again led to overcome his dis- 
like to this method of publication because of the 
sympathy he felt for the misfortunes of a fellow 
craftsman. Thomas Hood, already under the 
shadow of death, had established at the begin- 
ning of 1844 a magazine which bore his own 
name. Before six months had gone by, hemor- 
rhage of the lungs had brought him almost to the 
grave. Though he rallied subsequently to some 
extent, he broke down completely at the end of 
the year and never left his bed till in May, 1845, 
he was taken from it to his tomb. In this condi- 
tion of things, several friends of the dying man 
had come to his aid. Among these was Brown- 
ing. During the year preceding Hood's death he 
contributed several pieces to his magazine. The 
last of these which appeared in the number for 
April, 1845, '^^^ "The Flight of the Duchess"; 
for with the death of the editor, the following 
month, the poet felt himself relieved from any 
further obligation. 

It was part only of **The Flight of the Duch- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 159 

ess " which was then printed — exactly speaking, 
the first nine stanzas of the completed poem 
which now includes sixteen in all. Not till the 
publication of the "Dramatic Romances and 
Lyrics" was added the part containing the hunt 
and the scene with the gipsy. Curiously enough, 
we know from Browning's own words that not a 
line of this production as it first appeared, was 
written as he originally intended to write it. 
"As I conceived the poem," he said, "it con- 
sisted entirely of the Gipsy's description of the 
life the Lady was to lead with her future Gipsy 
lover — a real life, not an unreal one like that with 
the Duke. And as I meant to write it, all their 
wild adventures would have come out and the 
insignificance of the former vegetation have been 
deducible only — as the main subject has become 
now." ^ For one I confess to being delighted 
that Browning was somehow prevented from 
carrying out his original intention; that the de- 
scription of the unreal life with the Duke has 
been actually portrayed, and has not to be de- 
duced from something else; for the vivid de- 
scription of it given by himself is worth far more 

* "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 139. 



i6o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

than all the deductions that could have been 
made by all the members of all the Browning 
societies that ever have existed or ever will exist. 
Few there are of the nineteen pieces — or if the 
contrasted poems be counted separately — of the 
twenty-four pieces which constitute this collec- 
tion that are unfamiliar not merely to special 
students of Browning, but to all lovers of Eng- 
lish literature. They were shown to Miss Bar- 
rett in proof. ^ Their beauty and power sur- 
prised even her, disposed as she was to admire, 
and ready to find things admirable. "Now," 
she wrote, "if people do not cry out about these 
poems, what are we to think of the world ?" 
That they should cry out there was no question; 
that they would cry out, there was every reason 
to expect; that they did not cry out, we know. 
There was even more than lack of appreciation; 
there was sometimes positive condemnation. 
Along with the censure of some professional re- 
viewers, indeed, praise was bestowed upon them 
by others; but it was always praise accom- 
panied with qualifications. Still notice of them, 
favorable or unfavorable, had little weight with 
the public. Working against Browning's rep- 

' " Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, vol. I, p. 252. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING i6i 

utation was the indifference which I have previ- 
ously pointed out as being something far more 
baleful than hostile criticism. If people had only 
been willing to read, they could not have failed 
to cry out; but they simply refused to read. 

It is in truth hard for us now to comprehend 
how low for a long tim.e was the estimate taken of 
Browning's achievement; how small was the cir- 
culation of his writings, especially in his own 
country; and how completely his reputation was 
then overshadowed by that of his wife. Mrs. 
Browning died in June, 1861. She is now as un- 
duly depreciated as she was then unduly ex- 
alted; for up to the day of her death and for a 
number of years after she stood far higher in 
the estimation of the reading pubHc than did 
her husband. This was true even of America, 
where his poetry met with much greater favor 
than it did in his own land. A singular and 
striking proof of how much larger was the meas- 
ure she filled even here in the public eye deserves 
mention. Poe was not only one of the acutest 
of critics then living, but he had exceptional 
acquaintance with contemporary literature. In 
his review of Miss Barrett's volumes of 1844, he 
accorded to her superiority over every poet then 



1 62 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

living with the single exception of Tennyson. 
One, indeed, would almost infer from his words 
that of her future husband he either knew noth- 
ing or thought httle. ''That Miss Barrett," he 
wrote, "has done more in poetry than any wom- 
an living or dead, will scarcely be questioned; 
and that she has surpassed all of her poetical 
contemporaries of either sex (with a single ex- 
ception) is our deliberate opinion — not idly enter- 
tained, we think, nor founded on any visionary 
basis." 

At the preference exhibited by readers for the 
poetry of his wife. Browning did not grieve. 
There were a few who then ranked him much 
above her; but in that limited number he was not 
himself included. He fully agreed with the gen- 
eral public as to the superiority of her work to 
his own. Doubtless his intense affection blinded 
his judgment; for there can be no question as to 
his sincerity. "The true creative power is hers, 
not mine," he said. In the abounding love and 
admiration he felt for her, and in his generous 
and unselfish devotion to the extension of her 
name and fame, he was perfectly content to take 
a second place in the estimation of the public. 
But what he resented and what he had a right 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 163 

to resent was that he was accorded no place at 
all. In England the ignorance of his work and 
the poor opinion there entertained of it at that 
time seems now almost incredible. Not but in 
the worst of days he received that lofty praise 
from the few which is the sure forerunner of the 
large praise of the many. But among the many 
who gave him no recognition were comprised 
then the great majority of the most highly edu- 
cated class. It included even those distinguished 
in letters. One can understand and forgive the 
neglect of certain of his productions. But not 
to these alone did men at that time turn a deaf 
ear. They turned as deaf a one to the magnifi- 
cent pieces which had already been brought out 
and to others to be brought out later during the 
period of his unpopularity. 

The proof of this condition of things does not 
consist merely in the small sale his works then 
had; though necessarily that is evidence not to 
be gainsaid or undervalued. Not one of his in- 
dividual volumes ever went then into a second 
edition. It is, however, the incidental remarks 
of persons of high literary and social position that 
give us fuller glimpses of the absolute failure 
of Browning's contemporaries to -recognize his 



i64 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

greatness as a poet. One or two pieces of testi- 
mony may be worth citing. Mary Russell Mit- 
ford was an intimate friend of Miss Barrett. In 
1846 she wrote to a correspondent an account of 
her marriage to Browning. After speaking of 
the genius of the wife she went on to discourse in 
the following way of the husband. "He is a 
poet also," she said, "but I beheve that his ac- 
quirements are more remarkable than his poetry, 
though that has been held to be of high prom- 
ise." ' 

This was the sort of lukewarm appreciation 
which Browning received from even the most 
favorably disposed of the cultivated class, and 
that too after the series of "Bells and Pomegran- 
ates" had been published. Furthermore, the 
ignorance of him and the indifference to him 
seem to have increased as the years went by, 
instead of diminishing. The meager returns of 
sale furnished by his publishers Chapman and 
Hall, point very unmistakably to this fact. But 
we have even more direct evidence. In i860 
the noted philanthropist, Frances Power Cobbe, 
was staying at Florence. There she was in con- 
stant contact with the Brownings. While she felt 

* "Life of Mary Russell Mitford," London 1870, vol. Ill, p. 204. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 165 

the highest admiration for the literary achieve- 
ment of the wife, we have her own testimony that 
it never occurred to her or to any of her circle of 
associates that the husband was a poet worth 
considering. In her autobiography she records 
the obtuseness of herself and her friends. "At 
that time," she says, "I do not think that any 
one, certainly no one of the society which sur- 
rounded him, thought of Mr. Browning as a great 
poet, or as an equal one to his wife, whose ' Au- 
rora Leigh' was then a new book. The utter un- 
selfishness and generosity wherewith he gloried 
in his wife's fame perhaps helped to blind us, 
stupid that we were! to his own claims." ^ 

We know now that Browning felt keenly the 
injustice with which he was treated. We learn 
much about his attitude from his wife's corre- 
spondence. Her resentment of the neglect he 
experienced was greater than his own; at least 
it has reached us more definitely. "To you," 
she wrote to Browning's sister in i860, "I may 
say, that the blindness, deafness, and stupidity 
of the English public to Robert are amazing. 
Robert is. All England can't prevent his exist- 
ence, I suppose. But nobody there, except a 

» "Life of Frances Power Cobbe," Boston, 1890, vol. II, p. 343. 



1 66 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

small knot of pre-RafFaelite men, pretends to do 
him justice. Mr. Forster has done the best in 
the press. As a sort of lion, Robert has his range 
in society, and, for the rest, you should see Chap- 
man's returns; while in America, he's a power, 
a writer, a poet. He is read — he lives in the 
hearts of the people." The contrast between 
the estimate in which she and her husband were 
held in their own country and the feeling enter- 
tained about them in this, she expressed with 
a good deal of bitterness. " For the rest," she 
continued, "the English hunt lions too, but their 
favorite lions are chosen among 'lords' chiefly, 
or 'railroad kings.' 'It's worth eating much 
dirt,' said an Englishman of high family and 

character here, 'to get to Lady 's soiree.' 

Americans will eat dirt to get to us. There's the 
difference." ^ 

A year later Mrs. Browning records an instance 
of the ignorance prevailing about her husband 
and his work which, did it come from any other 
source than herself, it would be hard to credit. 
It occurs in a letter sent to her sister-in-law from 
Rome in 1 86 1. In it she speaks again of the atti- 

' " Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," New York, 1898, vol. 
II, p. 370. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 167 

tude of his countrymen toward her husband and 
his sense of its injustice. "His treatment in 
England," she wrote, "affects him naturally — 
and for my part I set it down as an infamy of that 
public — no other word. He says he has told 
you some things you had not heard, and which, 
I acknowledge, I always try to prevent him from 
repeating to any one. I wonder if he has told 
you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English 
lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours (observe 
that!) asked, the other day, the American Minis- 
ter whether Robert was not an American. The 
Minister answered, "Is it possible that you ask 
me this? Why, there is not so poor a village in 
the United States where they would not tell you 
that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and 
that they were very sorry that he was not an 
American.' Very pretty of the American Minis- 
ter — was it not } — and literally true besides." ^ 

Undoubtedly the popularity of Browning in 
this country was exaggerated by his wife to give 
point to the contrast. But there is no question 
that the reading public in England remained 
for a long time scandalously indifferent to his 

' ''Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," New York, 1898, 
vol. II, p. 436. 



1 68 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

achievement and showed but slight appreciation 
of its greatness. The fact of the neglect must be 
conceded. Is there any explanation of it, any 
palliation for it } Is there in particular any 
ground for the charge of unnecessary and wilful 
obscurity of meaning and harshness of versifica- 
tion, which whether really existing or merely 
asserted to exist militated constantly against the 
acceptance of the poet as poet ? Browning him- 
self was from the beginning well aware of his 
reputation for lack of clearness. In a letter sent 
in April, 1845, to his future wife he remarked that 
something he had written to her previously was 
"pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my 
writings — ^you will ask what it means," At times 
this complaint of obscurity afforded him matter 
for jest. He was fond of repeating a remark of 
Wordsworth about his marriage to Miss Barrett. 
"I hope," said the veteran poet, "that these young 
people will make themselves intelligible to each 
other, for neither of them will ever be intelligible 
to anybody else." The woman soon to be his 
wife admitted her own liability to this charge of 
obscurity. Occasionally too she herself found 
her future husband unintelligible. "People say 
of you and me," she wrote to him in the begin- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 169 

ning of their acquaintance, "that we love the 
darkness and use a Sphinxine idiom in our talk." 
She went on to make a personal application of 
this view to something which he had been writ- 
ing to her. "Really," she said, "you do talk a 
little like a Sphinx." * 

But Browning, though in a modified way he 
conceded his obscurity, denied that it was inten- 
tional. Occasionally, indeed, he resented an 
accusation of this sort. "I can have but little 
doubt," he remarked in a private letter belong- 
ing to 1868, "but that my writing has been, in 
the main, too hard for many I should have been 
pleased to communicate with; but I never de- 
signedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my 
critics have supposed." ^ Later, in 1872, in the 
preface to the selection then published of his 
poetical works, he declared himself innocent of 
"the charge of being wilfully obscure, uncon- 
scientiously careless and perversely harsh." 
There is indeed, no justification for the belief 
that these faults were intentional; but though 
unintentional, that they might be and were un- 

' "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," vol. I, 

P- S2>- 

^"Letters of Robert Browning," London, privately printed, 
1895, vol. I, p. 26. 



lyo THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

necessary, it never entered his mind to conceive; 
for while he did not purpose to be obscure, he 
felt under no obligation to strive to make himself 
intelligible, at least easily intelligible. 

In a further passage of the privately printed 
letter just cited, Browning exhibited his utter 
inability to comprehend the nature of the prob- 
lem which even the greatest of geniuses must 
solve who desires the suffrages of the public. " I 
never pretended," he wrote, "to offer such litera- 
ture as should be a substitute for cigars or a game 
of dominoes to an idle man." The self-suffi- 
ciency of this view is as astounding as its futility. 
He may not so have intended it; but it is the 
natural, almost the inevitable inference from the 
words, that those who gave him up because they 
found him difficult to comprehend must belong 
to the class who look upon literature as merely 
the amusement of an idle hour. At times, in- 
deed, one gets the impression from some of his 
utterances that he was almost disposed to resent 
having said anything that could be understood 
at once. This is indeed a view largely taken by 
his disciples. But if they do not know it, Brown- 
ing himself could hardly have failed to see that 
no charges of such a nature have been brought 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 171 

against poets as great as he and even greater. 
For instance, no one has found fault for a reason 
of this sort with Chaucer or Milton or Words- 
worth. No one further ever spoke or thought of 
their poetry as a substitute for a cigar or a game 
of dominoes. 

The subject is so important and the treatment 
of it has often been so confused that it may be 
well to have the nature of this problem distinctly 
presented. Obscurity in an author arises from 
two causes. It may be owing first to the novelty, 
depth or loftiness of his speculations which either 
range outside of the common track, or ascend to 
regions up to which the ordinary intellect finds 
it difficult to follow. Clearness of comprehen- 
sion always assumes, too, a certain amount of 
special knowledge or a certain degree of mental 
development on the part of the hearer or reader. 
What to one man may require the most labored 
explanation and then be only imperfectly under- 
stood, may convey its meaning to another at a 
glance. As the current of our life deepens and 
broadens, as it absorbs into itself new experiences 
and new sensations, as it gains new perceptions 
and enters into new states of mind, things which 
once seemed vague or incomprehensible come to 



172 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



Stand out before us in distinctest outline. They 
do so because they express precisely what we 
have at last come to learn or to feel. Through 
mental growth or perhaps more often through 
sad experience meanings previously obscure are 
clearly revealed to the inner consciousness. 

This is to say that we always have to be pre- 
pared, intellectually or morally, for what we re- 
ceive. The greatness of Shakespeare grows upon 
us as we advance in years, because we find in 
him so much that in earlier days we had passed 
over without regard or comprehension for the 
reason that it was beyond the reach of our intel- 
lects or outside of the lessons of our experience. 
Accordingly, that in any given instance we did not 
or do not enter into the full meaning of his words 
or of those of any other profound writer, is no 
more an argument against the art or genius dis- 
played or the clearness and intelligibility of its 
utterance than the inability of a child to under- 
stand a philosopher is proof that he is incom- 
prehensible; or of a beginner in mathematics to 
understand the integral calculus is satisfactory 
evidence that it is absurd. Either the intellect 
is not sufficiently developed, or the requisite pre- 
liminary knowledge of the subject treated is 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 173 

lacking; or both these may contribute to the fail- 
ure to perceive. In such cases the writer must 
not merely seem obscure, he must be obscure. 
But in neither case is it any fault of his own. 

But there is another kind of obscurity arising 
from the inabihty or neglect of the author to 
render himself intelligible. The thought, as he 
has come to see it, may strike him as perfectly 
clear; but he fails to fulfil the first duty of a 
writer, which is to take mentally the place of the 
reader whom he addresses; to have distinctly 
in his mind how what has been uttered will ap- 
pear to him who necessarily lacks the subtle 
chain of association which in his own case has 
connected thought and expression. That which 
has come uninvited to the one in flashes of in- 
spiration must be supplied to the other by the 
agency of reflection and study. All exertion of 
this kind which is unnecessary ought to be spared 
to the reader. The author who is unwilling to 
perform his duty in this respect has no right to 
complain when those, even of highest cultiva- 
tion, refuse to do for him the labor which he 
has no business to impose. In a world full of 
choicest literature that is comprehensible, it is 
inevitable that men will meet the difficulty of 



174 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

understanding such a writer by the easy device 
of not reading him. 

In Browning's case the obscurity is due to the 
operation of both these agencies. Both have 
acted and will continue to- act as hindrances to 
familiarity with his writings and consequently to 
the extension of his popularity. There is no 
question as to his profound intellectual power. 
He was, as Tennyson called him, "the greatest- 
brained poet in England." He therefore de- 
mands special study. He demands it the more 
because it is not depth of thought which so pe- 
culiarly characterizes his utterance as its many- 
sidedness and unexpectedness. The entirely 
novel point of view from which old ideas are 
presented, the entirely new light in which things 
familiar are made to show themselves, these con- 
stantly impress the mind and not infrequently 
startle it, utterly overthrowing, as they do, all pre- 
conceived opinion. Yet the moment any one of 
these revelations is brought fully to our knowl- 
edge, we feel something more than its justness. 
The sense of its obviousness comes over us at 
the same time. Though we should never have 
dreamed of it ourselves, we are, none the less, 
surprised that it has not occurred to us. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



175 



Out of many illustrations let us take for ex- 
amples three such well-known poems as "The 
Glove," and "Clive," and "Bishop Blougram's 
Apology." In the first the suitor leaps into the 
arena full of hungry wild beasts and at the risk 
of his life picks up the glove his mistress has 
purposely dropped. He secures it, returns in 
safety, and flings it in her face. We sympathize 
at first with the act of the man in thus publicly 
rebuking the heartless selfishness of the woman 
who exposes her lover to the needless risk of 
death for the sake of gratifying her vanity. But 
how unexpectedly and yet convincingly the poet 
shows the woman's intention to test and reveal 
the shallowness of the devotion professed by the 
suitor who avows his readiness to run all con- 
ceivable risks for her sake and then resents being 
called upon to do no more than the poor captors 
of the beasts are willing to encounter for a mere 
pittance of money. 

Take again the duel between Clive and the 
officer whose cheating at cards he has denounced. 
We admire the courage of the young clerk who 
looks death defiantly in the face, but refuses 
to retract his accusation. To Browning alone 
could have occurred the recognition of the 



176 THE EARLY LITERERY CAREER 

ground which the conscience-stricken gamester 
could have assumed; and instead of doing as he 
did, of what he could have said but did not say; 
but which if he had said would, as Clive himself 
confesses, have left him no other alternative than 
to atone for his accusation by taking his own life. 
Or consider the conversation or rather mono- 
logue in which Bishop Blougram discusses the 
question of faith with Gigadibs, the literary man, 
who had publicly doubted the former's genuine 
acceptance of the belief he avowed and preached. 
One can not well get rid of the feeling that in this 
marvellous piece of dialectics there is lurking a 
fallacy. The poet himself implies it in his final 
words. But to most of us it is a feeling, not 
a conviction. To the ordinary intellect there 
seems no escape from the remorseless logic with 
which the great bishop rolls out his mind and 
overwhelms Gigadibs. There are those indeed 
who profess to have unravelled the strands of 
falsehood which are interwoven with the truth 
in this remarkable poem; but they have done 
little else than reveal their inability to answer 
difficulties whose existence they do not per- 
ceive. They seem possessed by the belief that 
denunciation of Blougram's motives and char- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 177 

acter is an all-sufficient answer to his reason- 
ing. 

For the sake of the numerous surviving mem- 
bers of the never-dying family of Gigadibses, I 
can not but regret that Browning was not led to 
set forth in another poem the opposite point of 
view. A criticism of the work in which this par- 
ticular piece occurred came out in a Roman 
Catholic review not long after its publication. 
It was thought by the poet to have been written 
by Bishop Blougram himself, that is by Cardinal 
Wiseman. ^ The ascription of it to him is a good 
deal more than doubtful; in fact it is highly im- 
probable. But while the Cardinal's authorship 
of it would assuredly add to the interest taken by 
the reader, it would add little to the interest of 
what was written. The reviewer termed this 
poem satirical and impertinent. He resented the 
unworthy motives imputed to the bishop and the 
defence he is made to give of a self-indulgence 
which every honorable man would feel to be dis- 
graceful. None the less was he impressed and 
even secretly pleased by the triumphant way in 
which the prelate is made to dispose of his critic. 

'"Letters of Robert Browning," privately printed, London, 
1895, vol. I, p. 68. 



1 78 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

The work as a whole led him indeed to take a 
hopeful view of the poet's spiritual condition. 
His article concluded with this specially chari- 
table utterance: "If Mr. Browning," he wrote, 
"is a man of will and action, and not a mere 
dreamer and talker, we should never feel sur- 
prise at his conversion." ^ 

But there is something else essential to the 
equipment of the poet besides greatness of in- 
tellect. There is something else essential to 
poetry besides novelty or profundity of thought. 
Important as these are, there are other charac- 
teristics just as important. The poetry created 
to endure must have felicity and charm of ex- 
pression, independently of the ideas it seeks to 
convey. Otherwise it has no superiority to prose. 
In some of these needed qualities Browning is 
often lacking to an extent rarely exhibited in the 
case of any other writer of the first rank. If his 
virtues are extraordinary, so are his limitations. 
There is comparatively little in him of that flaw- 
lessness of form, that propriety of diction, that 
use of words to clothe the idea not to disguise it, 
that horizon clear from haze which a modern 

' The Rambler, a Catholic Journal and Review, new series, vol. 
V, p. 54, January, 1856. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 179 

poet has designated as the distinctive quaHties 
which have rendered the Hterature of Athens 
immortal. With Brow^ning strength was but 
rarely accompanied with grace. To his failure 
in these respects was largely due the failure of 
his general acceptance. As if the variety and 
profundity of his ideas were not enough to pre- 
vent the ordinary reader from giving them the 
painful attention they need for their full compre- 
hension, he frequently constructed his sentences 
so as to render difficult, if not to thwart wholly, 
the efforts of the reader to get any understanding 
of their purport. The involved constructions, 
the dislocated sentences, the abrupt transitions, 
all impose a burden upon him which makes it 
hard for him to follow easily the train of thought. 
Furthermore, the mind is apt to be called away 
from the consideration of the meaning by hav- 
ing its attention distracted by rugged versifica- 
tion, by out-of-the-way rymes, by peculiarities 
of expression that even in the more perfect pieces 
jar now and then upon the literary sense and de- 
tract from the exquisiteness of the workmanship 
displayed. 

This formlessness, this ruggedness, this ob- 
scurity are faults lying on the surface: They are 



i8o THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

SO obtrusive that no one can miss them, so re- 
pellent to many that they are deterred from pur- 
suing farther a quest which opens so unprom- 
isingly. For years these characteristics of his 
poetry worked steadily against the recognition 
of the poet. They cause the same attitude to be 
taken toward him now save with those who have 
come to consider and celebrate his uncouthness 
as art of the highest order; for there is no limit 
to the intrepidity of a Browning enthusiast. His 
thought, always worth considering, often pro- 
found, frequently failed to get itself clothed in 
adequate expression. This peculiarity is most 
noticeable in the pieces in which the intellect is 
acting as the pure intellect and not under the 
stress of emotion. You are interested in the 
idea, you are at times lured on by the quaint 
manner in which the idea is expressed or illus- 
trated. But this ought not to be the aim of the 
poet as poet. His business is not to startle and 
surprise, still less to puzzle and perplex, but to 
instruct and inspire; and he will never do the 
last work effectively, he will never be recognized 
for all time as having done it effectively who fails 
to appreciate the fact, and to act upon it, that 
an essential characteristic of the highest poetry is 



OF ROBERT BROWNING i8i 

the form which gives it distinction. Gold found 
in quartz rock may have as much intrinsic value 
as w^hen it has been smelted and coined; but it 
can never come into general current use. 

This view of Browning does not represent the 
attitude of hostile critics, but of personal friends. 
Take the case of Mrs. Browning herself. In love 
for the man and in admiration for the poet she 
could hold her own with the most ardent of the 
present generation of his female disciples. But 
neither depth of affection nor loftiness of esti- 
mate deprived her of her critical faculty. More 
than once she charged him with perplexing read- 
ers by presuming their knowledge of what he 
knew, but which in some cases they could not 
possibly know, or in other cases could not fairly 
be assumed to know. She objected also to the 
frequent roughness of his versification. There 
was in him a tendency — almost a habit, she ob- 
served — to make his lines difficult to read. " Not 
that music is required everywhere," she wrote, 
"but that the uncertainty of rhythm throws the 
reader's mind off the rail and interrupts his prog- 
ress with you and your influence with him." ^ 

^ "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett," New 
York, 1899, ■^°i- I> P- ^34- 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



A critical view, essentially of the same sort, was 
expressed by Landor, one of the warmest of his 
friends and one of the first to recognize his 
genius. As early as 1836, in his "Satire upon 
Satirists," he had hailed Browning as a poet. 
Yet he found the same difficulty in his writings 
which has caused perplexity to the rest of man- 
kind. " I only wish he would atticize a little," he 
wrote early in the forties. "Few of the Atheni- 
ans have such a quarry on their property, but 
they constructed better roads for the convey- 
ance of the material." 

This tendency to roughness and awkwardness 
of expression seems to have been inherent in 
Browning's nature. It would certainly have 
been lessened and might perhaps have been ex- 
tirpated by rigid training in his early years. In- 
stead it was confirmed by the desultory education 
he received. As a result it became in time prac- 
tically impossible for him to effect any genuine 
correction of his own works. What changes he 
made — and in some pieces they were fairly nu- 
merous — were of the nature of slight additions or 
omissions, or of variations, none of which con- 
tributed anything worth speaking of to clearness 
of comprehension. For the most part, the ideas 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 183 

once put forth, no matter how vaguely or crudely 
or clumsily expressed, continued to remain in 
the form in which they originally appeared. 
Jowett, with whom Browning stayed at the Ox- 
ford Commemoration in 1887, in commenting 
upon him to a correspondent, pointed out clearly 
the nature and origin of the distinguishing 
peculiarities of his style. "He is a very ex- 
traordinary man," wrote the Master of Balliol, 
" very generous and truthful, and quite incapable 
of correcting his literary faults, which at first 
sprang from carelessness and an uncritical habit, 
and now are born and bred in him. He has no 
form, or has it only by accident when the subject 
is limited. His thought and feeling and knowl- 
edge are generally out of all proportion to his 
powers of expression." ^ 

Along with this carelessness went the most 
extraordinary self-confidence, and, it is to be 
added, a self-satisfaction which never hesitated 
at self-assertion. His sensitiveness to criticism 
became keener as time went on. It kept pace 
indeed with the continuing if not growing crab- 
bedness and roughness of his later verse. It al- 

* Letter to Lady Tennyson in, " Alfred Lord Tennyson, A 
Memoir by his Son," New York, 1889, vol. II,- p. 344. 



1 84 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

most seems at times as if this were resorted to as 
a sort of proclamation of defiance to those who 
had found fault with him for the manifestation 
of these qualities. He affected, indeed, to scoff 
at his censurers. Had he been really indifferent, 
he would never have gone to the trouble of pa- 
rading his scorn. The resentment he felt was in- 
deed distinctly visible and sometimes lamentably 
displayed. Tennyson, as we all know, was abnor- 
mally sensitive to criticism; but he never made 
any such deplorable public exhibition of the feel- 
ing as did Browning in "Pachiarotto." It must 
always remain a marvel how any man in full 
possession of his senses, let alone a man of genius, 
could have perpetrated the dreadful doggerel of 
that poem, where the wretchedness of the reason- 
ing finds its fitting counterpart in the wretched- 
ness of the expression. Not much better is the 
shallow defence he made for his method of writ- 
ing in the epilogue to the volume bearing that 
title. It is one of the highest of tributes to 
Browning's essential greatness that his reputa- 
tion could emerge unscathed from those two dis- 
tressing struggles to be jocose and satirical. 

Many, perhaps most, of the things which stood 
in the way of his immediate and general accept- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 185 

ance by his contemporaries were remediable. 
Yet he was almost disposed to resent the sug- 
gestion that he should take any steps to remedy 
them. When Tennyson occasionally rallied 
him upon the harshness of his rhythm and the 
length and obscurity of his poems, he had but 
one answer. " I cannot alter myself," he would 
say; "the people must take me as they find me." 
This is a perfectly justifiable attitude for him to 
assume who is totally indifferent to the opinion 
of the publit; but he who assumes it has no right 
to complain if the public chooses not to take him 
at all. It is assuredly not the attitude of him 
who fixes his eye on either present or future 
fame; and Browning was far from being indif- 
ferent to either. So little indeed was he regard- 
less of contemporary popularity that he craved 
it and felt the denial of it to himself as a grievance 
and an injustice. 

He was fortunate enough, however, to outlive 
this period of neglect. The reputation of a gen- 
uinely great poet may be delayed; but it is cer- 
tain to come at last. Men could not remain for- 
ever indifferent to the genius displayed in Brown- 
ing's work, whatever fault they might find with 
its methods of manifestation. As time went on 



1 86 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

he steadily made his way into the appreciation of 
a slowly enlarging circle of admirers; and his 
greatness was conceded even by those who cen- 
sured most severely his shortcomings. The 
welcome which waited upon the publication of 
''The Ring and The Book" in 1868-69 proved 
clearly the increase of the estimation in which he 
had come to be held. Browning seemed to think 
that the comparative success of this work, the 
result of a slowly but steadily rising reputation, 
was due mainly to its length. He said at the 
time that he had gained at last the ear of the 
public, but he had done so by vigorously assault- 
ing it, and telling his story four times over.^ 
Knowledge of many abstruse things Browning 
possessed; but he never discovered that men 
accepted him in spite of his faults and not be- 
cause of them. 

It was not remarkable success indeed that he 
then gained; but as compared with the neglect 
he had previously endured, it was distinctly 
noticeable. The acceptance he had at last se- 
cured would have continued to strengthen and 
extend itself of its own accord; but owing to ad- 

* "Personal Remembrances of Sir Frederick Pollock," London, 
1887, vol. II, p. 202. Diary under date of April 3, 1869. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 187 

ventitious circumstances popularity came to him, 
a little more than half-a-score of years later, with 
a fulness which he had no reason to expect and 
which as a matter of fact we know that he did 
not expect. His last days were cheered by the 
ample if tardy recognition which was given to his 
genius. I have said that from the beginning he 
had been the favorite of a few. He was now to 
become a favorite of the many. The way had 
been slowly preparing for him when the one 
agency came into play that effectually broke up 
the indifference of the general public. This was 
the formation of the Browning Society in 1881, 
established mainly by the efforts of the late Fred- 
erick James Furnivall. This society with the 
innumerable branches which sprang from it all 
over England and America, worked not merely 
a reform in the poet's favor, but a revolution. 
It caused his name to be carried far and wide 
as a household word to every place where litera- 
ture was known at all, and, it must be added, to 
no small number of places where it had never 
been known before, and with the gradual decay 
of the temporary interest aroused has never 
been heard of since. 

There are authors to whom it would seem a 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



questionable compliment to have societies or- 
ganized under their name, whose duty it was, 
among other things, to ascertain the meaning of 
what they had been saying. Such a society, in 
the case of a living writer, seems to partake of the 
nature of an anachronism. Its very existence 
tends to prove in him who is made the subject 
of comment and investigation the existence of 
the very faults from the possession of which he is 
to be defended. Clearly no thought of this na- 
ture ever presented itself to Browning's mind. 
He was delighted with the efforts taken in his be- 
half as well as astounded by their success. "You 
very well know," he wrote to Furnivall, in Octo- 
ber, 1 88 1, "I can say nothing about this extraor- 
dinary halo of rainbow hues with which your 
wonder-working hand has suddenly surrounded 
my dark orb. As with the performances of the 
mosaicists I see at work here — all sorts of shining 
stones, greater and smaller, which hardly took 
the eye by their single selves — suddenly coalesce 
and make a brilliant show when put ingeniously 
together — as my dazzled eyes acknowledge, pray 
believe." * 



' Letter of Oct. 21, 1881, in "Letters of Robert Browning," pri- 
vately printed, 1895, vol. I, p. 86. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



We can all rejoice that this late deferred trib- 
ute of recognition came to cheer the closing 
years of the poet. He was no longer obliged to 
address the English public, as he did near the be- 
ginning of "The Ring and The Book," with the 
words "Ye, who like me not." Browning died 
rejoicing in the fulness of his fame. Gratifying 
as is the fact, there is hardly any question that 
much of the sudden and wide-spread popularity 
secured by the agency just described, was due to 
something else than appreciation of his genius 
as a poet. Accordingly, the reputation he thus 
acquired was largely factitious. As far as it is 
such, it has no element of permanence. It was 
not based primarily upon regard for his writings 
as literature. The rapid growth of the interest 
taken in them, after once being set in motion, 
owed its existence and extension to the men 
who looked upon them as furnishing materials 
for investigation and decipherment and not as a 
source of delight and inspiration. 

For Browning is supremely the poet of intel- 
lectually acute but unpoetical natures. Not but 
there are men possessed of exquisite literary 
taste with whom he is not merely a favorite 
author but the favorite author. What I am try- 



igo THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

ing to bring out is that a very large proportion of 
the ablest of his thorough-going partisans are 
much more remarkable for general mental activ- 
ity than for special literary sensitiveness. The 
things they admire in him are not those which 
appeal to the feelings, but those which deal with 
the reason. No one will deny the value of the 
poems in which this latter characteristic is pre- 
dominant — sometimes so predominant in his 
case as practically to exclude the former. But 
there are many who will deny their supreme 
value. Striking thoughts are often in them 
which impress the mind; fine passages, some- 
times, which linger in the memory. But too 
generally lacking in them is that intense fire, 
that passion which fuses thought and feeling in- 
to felicity of expression which is the envy and 
despair of the imitator. The verse which exer- 
cises and delights the intellect but fails to touch 
or inspire the heart may in many respects be 
worthy of the greatest admiration; but it will 
never take rank as the highest form of poetry. 

It is not to be denied, however, that the hazi- 
ness which envelops much of Browning's utter- 
ance piques curiosity in many minds of a high 
order and imparts to much of his work a peculiar 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



191 



interest of its own. There is, furthermore, a cer- 
tain class of men who fully believe that obscur- 
ity is an essential element of profundity. Brown- 
ing's frequent ambiguity and uncertainty of 
meaning renders it possible for such persons to 
find in his words whatever acute intellect or 
addled brain chooses to look for. They are 
thereby enabled to read into his work their per- 
sonal conclusions and beliefs, and make him give 
his sanction to views of their own which they 
deem peculiarly profound. The proceedings of 
the various Browning Societies furnish inter- 
minable and inconclusive discussions of what he 
might have meant but did not mean inevitably. 
One of them, duly recorded, is worth citing as an 
illustration. A member of the original Browning 
Society — one conspicuous enough to be chosen 
to preside at its first meeting — read later a paper 
before it in which he set forth a certain interpre- 
tation of the poem entitled "Childe Roland to 
the Dark Tower Came." This was called in 
question by the founder of the Society. On this 
very matter he said that he had consulted the 
poet himself who had three times uttered an em- 
phatic "No" to the theory which had just been 
propounded. Against any such method of as- 



192 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

certaining the author's sense, the proclaimer of 
the controverted view protested. If they were to 
adopt the poHcy of consulting the poet himself 
as to the meaning he sought to convey, there 
would be, he insisted, no need of any Browning 
Society at all/ 

But efforts to give clearness of outline to what 
is doubtful and perplexing neither implies nor 
necessitates enjoyment of Browning's poetry as 
poetry. Still less is such appreciation of it in- 
volved in the many vague discourses written 
about it or certain portions of it by men who find 
a natural outlet for thoughts above the reaches 
of their souls in language beyond the compre- 
hension of the ordinary mind. Not even is it 
necessarily indicated in much of the valuable 
work which has been given up to the explanation 
of his words and phrases, to the disclosure of 
recondite allusion, to the clearing up of difficul- 
ties of construction. Too much cannot be said 
in praise of the utility and importance of labor 
of this nature. But it is in no proper sense the 
study of literature. It is the same sort of study 
as that which leads men to the perusal of the 

* Monthly Abstract of Proceedings of the Browning Societ}'. 
Meeting of May 24, 1882, p. 26. 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 193 

works of Homer and Virgil, not for the sake of 
their poetry but for the hght they throw upon dis- 
puted points of inflection and syntactical con- 
struction. A great deal of the interest that has 
been manifested in Browning investigation is far 
higher in degree, indeed, but it is not essentially 
different in kind from that displayed in guessing 
the answers to riddles or deciphering the enigmat- 
ical representation of words in the figures found 
in rebuses; or, if a more dignified comparison 
be desired, from that employed in the solution 
of intricate mathematical problems. All this is 
to say that much of the study given to the poet 
is not the study of literature. In it exercise of 
the understanding has been demanded, not gra- 
tification of the taste nor appreciation of the 
work of the creative imagination. 

If there be justice in this view it follows that 
a good deal of the vogue which Browning's 
poetry suddenly gained was not due to the at- 
traction which it exercised as literature. That 
was a subject to which a large proportion of his 
new admirers were comparatively indifferent. 
They were not specially susceptible to the charm 
of poetry as poetry. In the best representatives 
of this class the intellect had been developed out 



194 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



of all proportion to the taste. Such men are not 
especially drawn to writers in whom loftiness 
of speculation has found its fitting counterpart 
in clearness and beauty of expression. To this 
class belongs the large number of active but un- 
formed minds. Accordingly, with a body of 
young and promising students, it would as a 
general rule be much easier to arouse interest in 
Browning than in almost any other great author 
of our speech. The genuine enjoyment of Mil- 
ton or Wordsworth or Tennyson presupposes, 
as a fundamental condition, the existence of a 
certain degree of fondness for literature as litera- 
ture. But this is ordinarily one of the last results 
of cultivation. Naturally, for it such persons 
are in general unprepared. Unquestionably, 
enjoyment of this precise sort is inspired by 
Browning's best production. But he presents 
also a body of poetry of which this cannot be 
said. The study of it does not demand nor does 
it develop literary appreciation. But it does re- 
quire keen intellectual acuteness. The exercise 
of the latter is the sort of work In which young 
men of quick minds but undeveloped taste can 
easily be made to take delight. It is all the more 
satisfactory to them because while they are do- 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 195 

irig little more than unravelling the meaning of 
linguistic puzzles or dragging an idea to light 
from its misty hiding-place, they honestly be- 
lieve that the interest they take in what they are 
reading is due to their enjoyment of it as poetry 
pure and simple. 

The formation of the Browning Society there- 
fore counteracted to some extent the good it did 
to the extension of his reputation by placing an 
obstacle in the way of its permanence. As his 
poorest work was generally his obscurest, to that 
much of the attention of his professed disciples 
was devoted. It was largely diverted from that 
portion of his production which does not need 
the exploitation of organized bodies to discover 
and appreciate its beauty and power. Brown- 
ing's best poems occasionally present puzzles; 
his poorest frequently present little else; at all 
events, the most interesting thing about them is 
the puzzles. Accordingly, these are the pieces 
which arouse the enthusiasm of certain of his 
partisans. To them disproportionate importance 
is attached. To the explanation of the hidden 
meaning found in them painful research is given 
up. The disciples celebrate the poet not for 
what is clearly and vividly expressed but for 



196 THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 

what is vague and perplexing. Hence mere 
Browning societies were found inadequate; so 
Sordello societies were formed and flourished. 
Commentaries were produced which, so far as I 
can judge from my own struggles with some of 
them, possess a peculiar interest of their own in 
having achieved the seemingly impossible task 
of being more difficult to understand than the 
texts they set out to interpret. In fact, com- 
mentaries on Browning generally bear a close 
resemblance to foghorns. They proclaim the 
existence of fog; but they do not disperse it. 

It need not be denied, however, that obscurity 
has its advantages for the idolater, if not for the 
being idolized. It constitutes those who devote 
themselves to the interpretation and exploitation 
of the generally unintelligible a class by them- 
selves. Nothing so conducive to the sense of 
superiority has ever been devised. The mem- 
bers of this inner circle of disciples intimate 
always and sometimes assert that it is only for 
mental and spiritual athletes like themselves to 
grapple with the problems of life and conduct 
which Browning sets before us. Accordingly, 
they feel justified in assuming an air of compas- 
sionate condescension to the grosser denizens of 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 



197 



the lower literary world, the intellectual outcasts 
who prize most in the poet what is comparatively 
easy to read and to understand. They look 
upon themselves as an elect body. To them be- 
longs a higher mental development, a clearer 
spiritual vision. The more puzzling the pro- 
duction, the keener is their enjoyment of it, the 
loftier is their estimate of it. It is in works of 
this character that Browning reserves himself 
for them. In these he does not lower himself to 
the mean capacities of the common mind. To 
the chosen band alone is it given to recognize 
him there as he is, the seer, the revealer of the 
mysteries of nature and of life, the bearer of a 
divine message to his generation. It must 
always remain a matter of regret, however, that 
the ability given to these esoteric disciples to 
penetrate into the mystery of Browning's mean- 
ing has not been accompanied with a corre- 
sponding ability to put into intelligible speech 
what they have brought back from that upper 
air of speculation to which their strong-winged 
thought has enabled them to soar. 

If in these lectures I may seem to some to have 
laid too much stress upon what is imperfect and 
unsatisfactory in the art and achievement of a 



THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER 



great poet, it is because I sincerely believe that 
the exaggerated and unwarranted praise which 
has been given to a good deal of his work will set 
in motion a reaction which in turn will have the 
tendency to bring back the deplorable conditions 
of indifference to it and consequent neglect of it 
that waited upon it during a large share of his 
own life. A great author has a right to demand 
that he shall be judged by his best. If his poor- 
est is forced upon us as peculiarly representa- 
tive by those who set themselves up as his cham- 
pions, disregard of the former is sure in time to 
follow. As coming generations recede more and 
more from Browning's day, they will tend more 
and more to revolt from the doctrine which des- 
ignates a portion of his work as supremely in- 
tellectual and profound, because it is couched in 
uncouth verse and obscure phraseology. If this 
be made a point of belief, the circle of his readers 
will be steadily narrowed. The general acknowl- 
edgment of the greatness of his genius will never 
be threatened by the attacks of hostile critics; 
but it stands in some danger from the constant 
exaltation of his least satisfactory work by the 
most vociferous of his extreme partisans. The 
contemporary indifference manifested toward 



OF ROBERT BROWNING 199 

him was largely his own fault; if in time coming 
there be return of this indifference, for it the un- 
wisdom of his advocates will be mainly respon- 
sible. 

For, as I look at it, so all-important in poetry 
is the expression of the thought, that when the 
thought is great but the expression unsatisfac- 
tory, that very fact removes it out of the realm 
of the highest literary achievement. Accordingly, 
I venture to take the ground that in the future a 
great mass of Browning's verse will have but a 
very limited body of readers and a still more 
limited body of admirers. It is because I do not 
believe that there is any lasting pleasure in 
formlessness, any genuine vitality in inarticulate 
phraseology, that I express here a view which is 
opposed to that which has of late had wide ac- 
ceptance. Poems of his there are which will 
never cease to be cherished so long as English 
Hterature endures. Still with his works as with 
those of ether writers nature in the end will as- 
sert her rights. The verse of his which will last 
longest, which will reach the widest circle, which 
will meet everywhere with the keenest apprecia- 
tion will be, as it has been, that which offers 
fewest difficulties either in the way of compre- 



ROBERT BROWNING 



hension or of diction. The poems of Browning 
that will carry his name down to remotest poster- 
ity will be those that are the least representative 
of him in the eyes of no small number of his pres- 
ent admirers. 



INDEX 

Adams, Sarah Flower, 8. 
Argosy, The, 127. 
Arnould, Je#, 124. J»»efK 
Athenceum, The, 13, 32, 33, 83, 97, 109. 
Atlas, The, 12, 13, 32, 33, 82, 93, 109. 

Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett (see Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
ing). 

Barrett, Lawrence, 61. 

bombast, 25. 

Bridell-Fox, Mrs., 127. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 14, 17, 49, 69, 80, 88, 97, 
98, 99, 148-152, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 168, 181. 

Browning, Robert, birth of, 3; education of, 19; formless- 
ness and ruggedness of expression of, 178-183; obscur- 
ity of, 5, 20, 62, 75-84, 168-174; observance of the 
Unities of, loi, 153-155; popularity of, in America, 93, 
166, 167; position of, as a dramatist, 24, 60-72, loi; 
prose of, 105; unpopularity of, in England, 163-167; 
writings of : 
Bells and Pomegranates, 96-101, 109, 112, 148, 149, 

/S5> 164. 

Bishop Blougram's Apology, 175-178. 

Bloti' the 'Scutcheon, A, 45, 61, 70, 112, 154; charac- 
ter of, as a drama, 1 31-146; stage history of, 113- 

131- 
Camp and Cloister, 157. 
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, 191. 
Clive, 175. 

20I 



202 INDEX 

Colombe's Birthday, 6i, 112, 113, 148, 154. 

Dramatic Lyrics, 155, 156. 

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 155, 157, 159-161. 

Flight of the Duchess, The, 158-160. 

Glove, The, 175. 

In a Balcony, 59. 

In a Gondola, 157. 

Incondita, 9. 

King Victor and King Charles, 154, 156. 

Luria, 68-72, 112, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154. 

Men and Women, 157. 

Pachiarotto, 184. 

Paracelsus, appearance and reception of, 22-44, 47 > 

55> 56, 57> 73. 74, 75, 77, 82, loi, 107, 156. 
Pauline, appearance and reception of, 7-19, 28, 29. 
Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 156. 
Pippa Passes, appearance and reception of, 59, loi- 

112, 156. 
Return of the Druses, The, 112, 148, 154. 
Ring and the Book, The, 186, 189. 
Sordello, appearance and reception of, 73-93, 95, 106, 

107, 108, 109, 148, 156. 
Soul's Tragedy, A, 105, 112, 148-153, 154- 
Strafford, reception of play of, 46-59, 64, 72, 73, 74, 

82, 114, 148, 156; Browning, joint author with 

Forster of biography of, 47-49. 
Through the Metidja to Abdel Kader, 157. 
Waring, 124, 157. 
Browning Society and Societies, the, 16, 48, 128, 160, 

187-192, 195. 
Byron, Lord, 4. 

Carlyle, Jean Welsh, 76, 86. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 76. 
Century Magazine, The, 115. 



INDEX 



203 



Chapman, George, 76, 81. 
Chaucer, Geofifrey, 171. 
Cobbe, Frances Power, 164. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 38. 

Dante, 74. 

Barley's "Plighted Troth," 118, 119. 

Dickens, Charles, 131. 

Domett, Alfred, 124. 

Donne, John, 21, 

Drury Lane Theater, 117-119, 128. 

Edinburgh Review, The, 57. 
Eliot, Sir John, 47. 

Examiner, The, 12, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 52, 53, 83, 107, 123, 
130, 155- 

Faucit, Helen (Lady Martin), 51, 52, 58, 113, 122. 

Flower, Eliza, 8, 9. 

Fonblanque, Albany, 12. 

Forster, John, 12, 31, 34, 35, 36-38, 42, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 

54, 83, 107, 130, 155, 166. 
Fox, William Johnson, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 34, 38, 45, 158. 
Eraser's Magazine, 15, 42. 
Furnivall, Frederick James, 187, 188, 191. 
fustian, 25. 

Gosse, Edmund, 35, 115. 

Haymarket Theater, 117. 

Herford, Charles Harold, 124. 

Hood, Thomas, 158. 

Horace, 102. 

Home, Richard Hengist, 42, 43. 

Hunt, John Henry Leigh, 12, 39, 55. 



204 INDEX 

Jerrold, Douglas, 76, 78. 
Jowett, Benjamin, 183. 

Kenyon, John, 97, 98. 
Kingsley, Charles, 78. 
Knowles, James Sheridan, 122, 130. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 182. 
Literary Gazette, The, 12, 14, 34, 83, 109. 
London Daily News, The 115. 
London Times, The, 123, 131. 
Lowell, James Russell, 79. 

Macready, William Charles, 31, 45, 46, 49-54, 57, 58, 70, 

ii3-ii5> 117-125, 127, 156. 
Marston, Westland, 118, 119, 120, 121. 
Martineau, Harriet, 73, 77. 
Metropolitan Magazine, The, 34. 
Mill, John Stuart, 14. 
Milton, John, 29, 85, 171, 194. 
Mitford, Mary Russell, 164. 
Monthly Repository, The, 8, 11, 35, 38, 158. 
Moxon, Edward, 23, 96. 

New Monthly Magazine, The, 30, 38, 42. 
North American Review, The, 79. 

Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, 35, 115. 

Phelps, Samuel, 113, 1 28-130. 
Phelps, W. May, 129. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 161. 
Pollock, Sir Frederick, 186. 

Rambler, The, 178. 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 18. 



INDEX 205 

Sadler's Wells Theater, 128-130. 

Scott, William Bell, 55. 

Shakespeare, William, 50, 60, 68-71, 147, 172. 

Sharp, William, 36, 76, 77. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 38, 87. 

Smith, William, 122, 130. 

Southey, Robert, 116. 

Spectator, The, 12, 32, 33, 81, 108, in. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 76, 77, 81. 

TaiVs Edinburgh Magazine, 14. 
Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 31. 
Taylor, Sir Henry, 29, 36, 42, 44. 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 4, 11, 23, 57, 76, 79, 162, 174, 
184, 185, 194. 

Vandenhoff, John, 53. 

Westminster Review, The, 11. 

Wilson, Effingham, 23. 

Wiseman, Nidiolas Patrick Stephen, 177. 

Wordsworth, William, 38, 79, 168, 171, 194. 



iG¥ m-i 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
NOV 6 ^5'* 



